Community Service
by Jay-La52
Summary: Jess never went to Stars Hollow, continuing down a bad path living in New York, eventually getting punished with community service, where he happens to bump into a certain Gilmore fresh from her yacht-stealing escapades. Lit. Set around 6x03 and onwards.
1. Introduction

**Summary: Jess never went to Stars Hollow, continuing down a bad path living in New York, eventually getting punished with community service, where he happens to bump into a certain Gilmore fresh from her yacht-stealing escapades. Lit. Set around 6x03 and onwards.**

**A/N: Oops, I went and started a new story. Again. When I already have two stories still in progress. Oops. That's why this is just a very, very short introduction-y chapter, and this fic will not be touched, mentioned or even thought about until There's The Rub is all over and done with. Well, that's a lie, since I constantly have lines of dialogue running through my head, so that thought about one should be discounted...Anyway, this was basically a bit of fun. As much as I love Mature!Jess, my favourite will always be sarcastic, chip-on-his-shoulder Jess, and I just can't change that no matter how many times I watch his season 6 episodes. Anyway, at this time I always think Rory acts kind of spoilt, well, she acts spoilt a lot of the time, and no one ever calls her on it, so this idea just popped into my head. But, yeah, I'm babbling: enjoy, I hope.

* * *

**

A mild sense of irritation had been prickling at the edge of Rory Gilmore's consciousness for the duration of her community service that day. It really was stupid, just a little, tiny, niggly thing. It was the study tree all over again and, God, she should have learnt her lesson from that experience; if a Yale student hadn't reacted particularly well to her somewhat quirky needs then it was highly unlikely that a person being forced to do community service would react much better. And yet, for some inexplicable reason, she'd let this stupid little thing get to her and this had resulted in her current frustration.

She'd gotten it into her pretty little head that it was a good idea to march up to the surly-looking, sarcastic, admittedly attractive, new guy and issue what she thought was a perfectly polite request.

"Excuse me, I'm sorry, it's just that that garbage picker thing – whatever it is you call it – is the one I always use and I was just wondering if you wouldn't mind trading?" she asked, faltering slightly under his probing gaze, his chocolate eyes glinting with a mixture of amusement and annoyance. Uncomfortable, she continued to babble, "It's just that it's the only one that's exactly the right height for me and the top part's kinda moulded to my hand, and it took me days to find one as perfect as Don and – "

"Don?" he cut her off at last, raising his eyebrows. The sound of his voice for the first time caused her to hesitate.

"Yeah, I- I named him – it – Don," she clarified, feebly, starting to see how petty this whole thing was.

"Huh," was all she got in response, before he turned to face away from her, continuing to work as though he'd never been interrupted.

Rory glared at him, feeling affronted; regardless of how silly her gripe with him was, the guy was just being plain rude. She took a moment to examine him while he was facing away from her. He was around her height – which meant Don would be the perfect height for him, too, she thought, bitterly, glaring at him harder. He had quite messy chestnut hair that she'd probably have found cute usually but, in her current state of mind, was just further evidence of the guy's laziness and general lack of care for anything, be it hair or lovingly named cleaning utensils. She noted with further annoyance that there was a Hemingway novel sticking out of his back pocket; was this guy designed to infuriate her? Riled, she walked back around into his line of vision.

"Excuse me," she repeated, in a harsher tone than before. "You could at least answer me instead of ignoring me like a five year old."

"I'm not the one naming garbage disposal utensils," he replied, in that delightful sarcastic way that Rory was beginning to become accustomed to from him.

"You know what? Fine. I had a nice rhythm here, long before you reared your gel-covered, Hemingway-reading head, and Don was part of that, but if you want to be a jerk about it, fine."

"Huh, interesting that your gaze immediately goes to my back pocket," he replied, smirking.

She rolled her eyes, blushing, "Don't flatter yourself. I just happened to notice the name of one of the world's most dull writers protruding from your pocket, okay?"

"You're cracked."

"As well-reasoned an argument as that is, I have yet to see anything from a Hemingway novel that could compare to anything of actual substance," Rory persisted, exaggerating slightly in her satisfaction at having found a topic that annoyed him.

He rolled his eyes, "So what are you reading that's of so much substance?"

"I'm re-reading The Age of Innocence," she replied, defiantly.

"Please," he scoffed.

"Please what? It's a great novel."

"Wharton spends more time describing the settings and the clothing than the actual plot."

"It's about the social trappings of that time! The clothing and settings are all a part of the carefully crafted society in which Archer and Olenska have to live."

"Whatever," he said, turning away again.

"Look, will you just give me the stupid garbage picker?" Rory asked, unsure why she was holding onto this petty argument, while – although she'd never admit it – kind of enjoying the back-and-forth banter.

He turned back around, the amusement drained from his face, leaving carefully controlled irritation, "So, what was it? A Ferrari? A jet? A golf cart?"

"What?" Rory asked, thrown off-guard.

"The thing you stole. I figure you're not the type to want to rob anything major, and you wouldn't be here voluntarily, unless it's to spend quality time with Don, so that leaves joy rides and drug possession, and I thought the former seemed more likely.

Rory glared at him a moment, before muttering, "It was a yacht."

He shrugged, "Figures."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"You just seem the type to steal something stupid, superfluous and not yours. You know: spoilt."

Rory gaped at him with a mixture of incredulity and outrage, "_Excuse_ me?"

"You rich kids feel entitled to whatever you want: yachts, trust funds, and garbage pickers, apparently..."

Rory held back a growl of frustration, as she began just blurting out disjointed sentences. "I'm not rich, and- and I don't have- and Don, and..." she trailed off, before exclaiming, "Fine! Keep him – it – whatever!" and storming off.

What a jerk.

* * *

The next day, Rory went to sign in for that day, and found Don leaning next to where her community service jacket was hanging up, with a novel on the floor next to it: For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway. Flicking through, she saw a lot of cramped notes in the margin, and then, written on the front page:

_Give it another try, maybe it'll keep you from anymore grand theft boating you've got planned._

_Oh, and keep Don, since you two seem to have such a deep emotional connection to each other._

_Jess_

Rory bit back her grin as she remembered she was still annoyed with him for his judging of her the day before. Her curiosity aroused, she shoved the novel in her bag, wanting to see how he could possibly have so much to write on the painful Ernest Hemingway before putting on her jacket and turning back to Don with a smile.

"Aw, I missed you, boy!"

* * *

**A/N: Sorry if the whole Don thing seems OOC, but hey, this is the girl who gave someone a twenty for a seat by a tree, she gets obsessive about inanimate objects. Anyway, please review! I just want to see if anyone's interested in seeing this continued, because I don't know if I will or not.**


	2. Ambiguity

**Summary: Jess never went to Stars Hollow, continuing down a bad path living in New York, eventually getting punished with community service, where he happens to bump into a certain Gilmore fresh from her yacht-stealing escapades. Lit. Set around 6x03 and onwards.**

**A/N: Well, hello again, it's been slightly (drastically) longer than I intended, and for that I apologise. God, this sounds so formal. Anyway, I've got this whole story mapped out now, so updates should be semi-(semi-semi-semi-semi-)regular, but I wouldn't hold me to that considering I've never been much good at updating regularly, and at the moment I have the excuse of college work being freaking **_**hard**_** and there's a ridiculous amount of it. Ugh, babbling again, bottom line: I don't know how regularly I can update, I'll try my best, sorry it's been so long, enjoy the chapter! (I hope.)**

**Oh, and sorry if this seems quite filler-y, I have a lot planned out, but I thought I'd pace it out and make the chapters shorter than mine usually are, so I'll hopefully be able to update more frequently (fingers, toes and every other possible body part crossed).**

**Disclaimer: I own nothing but this laptop and the ridiculously-named internet "dongle" that allows me to communicate with all of you lovely people.

* * *

**Hands happily wrapped around Don – that's right, no matter how many tousle-haired hoodlums mocked her for it, she'd stubbornly personified the thing from the beginning and that was how she planned to continue – Rory walked out into the open, instinctively looking around for the sullen stranger who had managed to pique her interest. She shoved the Hemingway in her back pocket, unconsciously mirroring the actions of the new guy as she weaved between the felons whom she'd only just managed to stop having nightmares about being strangled by (usually using the brown paper bag in which Emily packed her lunch). She was actually surprised to find that she recognised most of the faces that she was walking past now. There was Rinaldi (drug possession), who had the work ethic of a damp log, but shared a mutual hatred with Spiro (grand theft auto), which ensured that they worked twice as hard out of competition when assigned adjacent areas. Next she caught sight of Sanderson (bar fight), whose ability with a spear made him an asset to the team while provoking a certain amount of curiosity as to whether there was a connection between this buried talent and the crime that had put him in the position to use it. She shuffled quickly past the McFarland Brothers (no one really knew why they had community service, and the enjoyment they got out of piercing garbage meant that they were given too wide a berth for anyone to find out), praying that today wouldn't be the day that they got through their fourth set of garbage pickers due to their somewhat aggressive technique.

Despite the array of familiar faces, her gaze didn't land upon that of the new guy – Jess, she corrected herself, reminded of the scrawled name in the front of the book – serving to sharpen her curiosity. Recognising the choppy red hair of Liza, Rory approached her, frowning at the unwarranted twinge of disappointment she felt when she realised he wasn't there. Despite the fact that they'd only shared a couple of irritated words, she had to admit she was kind of intrigued; she hadn't really expected to see a novel (even if it was a Hemingway) sticking out of the pocket of any of the people here, and the fact that he'd surprised her with a gesture that could only be described as nice (wrapped in a neat package of sarcasm, of course) only increased the sense of ambiguity surrounding the dark haired stranger, like the cloud of smoke currently surrounding her friend.

Snapping out of her train of thought as she noticed this, she picked up speed, snatching the offending cigarette away from Liza despite the annoyed '_Hey!_' she got in response, stubbing it out with her toe.

"Aw, Liza, you were doing so well," Rory complained, watching with disapproval as Liza inhaled some of the smoke left behind.

"Really? 'Cos I'm feeling pretty damn good now," she replied, sighing contentedly.

"Yeah, I hear cancer can have that effect on a person," Rory replied, drily.

"Can we talk about something _not_ related to a terminal disease, please?"

"Fine," Rory said, with a mock sigh of defeat, before taking the opportunity to grab the pack out of Liza's pocket while she was turning away. "Ha!"

Liza narrowed her eyes, "Who knew the whole Miss Perfect act could mask pure, pure evil."

"That's Ms. Perfect, actually," Rory shot back, as she started dutifully spearing the garbage from the side of the road. Chocolate wrapper, chocolate wrapper, cheeseburger wrapper – God, no wonder this country's slowly becoming obese...

"Hey, I saw you talking to the new guy yesterday," Liza mentioned, hoping the abrupt change of topic would put an end to their usual 'is Liza slowly killing herself' conversation. Rory's eyes immediately snapped up at the mention of the guy, momentarily forgetting about the plastic cup she'd been in the process of spearing.

Quickly covering up her all-too-obvious curiosity, Rory forced her gaze back down to the ground as she feigned disinterest, "Oh yeah? Which guy was that?"

"Broody, rebellious looking, insanely hot – you know the one."

"Oh, right. Him," Rory replied, the reasons that she never pursued a career in drama becoming increasingly obvious. "God, he was annoying."

"With a face like that you can afford to be," Liza remarked, philosophically.

Rory smirked at that response, before continuing with what she hoped was a casual, nonchalant tone, "So do you, uh- do you know anything about him?"

"Not a lot; no one really knows what he's here for. According to Spiro he's not from around here; New York, I think that's where he said he was from. Either that or New Jersey – something beginning with 'new'."

"Huh, I wonder how he ended up doing community service here," Rory thought aloud.

"You seem awful curious for someone who claims to find the guy annoying," Liza teased, noting with amusement the slight colour in Rory's cheeks.

"It's just weird, that's all," Rory said, before realising that her justification was falling on deaf ears as she noticed Liza's gaze drift longingly over to a cigarette butt on the other side of the road. "Ugh, you're pathetic; c'mon, let's get you out of the way of temptation."

Reluctantly, Liza allowed herself to be steered away from the side of the road, seeming, thankfully for Rory, to have lost the thread of the previous conversation.

* * *

After quickly checking to see whether there was a maid about the place (no matter how long she lived there, she still felt awkward having someone cleaning up after her), Rory entered the pool house with a sigh of relief. Vaguely wondering whether she could hold off her exhaustion long enough to make it to her bed, she took a few steps forward before giving up and slumping down onto the sofa (who was she kidding? Her room was _miles_ away) and kicked off her shoes. As if eight hours on her feet picking up garbage while people drove past judging you wasn't tiring enough, keeping Liza from a source of nicotine was like trying to keep her mother away from caffeine.

Her mother. Star's Hollow. Yale. The future she was supposed to have.

Rory sighed, rubbing her eyes to stop the pricking feeling that she told herself was only her eyes watering from fatigue. She didn't have the energy to run through the list of reasons why what she was doing was the right thing and, besides, each time she does they always seem flimsier than the time before. No, best not to think about it at all, right? Right. Best to sleep, sleep is good, sleep is heavenly...

Nope, no good, closing her eyes now resulted in a series of memories of her childhood running through her head, and that wasn't going to be conducive to sleep at all. Great. Okay, regroup, what other distracting things are there to do that don't require moving? Reading? No book within reach of the couch. TV? The remote was several feet away in the conveniently out-of-reach but neat-looking place to which the maid always returned it. Rory glared into space, resigned to having to move as she shifted in order to get up, inadvertently causing something to start digging into her back. Curious, she reached to grab the offending object and came back with the Hemingway novel she'd absent-mindedly shoved in her back pocket earlier.

_Huh_, Rory thought. _Well, if nothing else, that should at least put me to sleep_. She skimmed over the note at the beginning a couple more times, her eyes combing over the hurried cursive as though it'd give her further insight into its elusive owner. Sparing the message a final smirk which would have made the writer proud, she flicked over to the next page, expecting to feel the usual boredom that she associated with attempting Hemingway novels.

Three hours and four hundred and seventy-one pages later and the feeling still hadn't presented itself – quite the opposite, in fact – as she turned over the last page, feeling the habitual exhilaration of having completed a book in one sitting. She couldn't believe it: not only had she made it through a Hemingway (and in three hours, no less) without once feeling her eyelids start to droop, but those notes – God, the _notes_ – had actually served to enhance the experience to the point where she actually felt the need to re-read it. Flicking back through the novel, reading margins at random she did a quick mental tally of what she now knew about Jess; Number one, stand-offish and judgemental, she thought, remembering their first (and only) conversation, two, sarcastic, with a tendency to smirk. A lot. Just plain unfriendly, too. But, at the same time...returningDon with the book had been...sweet? That didn't sound right in conjunction with him, but it was the only way she could think to describe that action. And smart, too – _really_ smart, she corrected, thinking back to some of the insightful points she'd just read, points that she, proud adorer of literature, would have been hard-pressed to find. Yes, it couldn't be denied that he was extremely intelligent, as well as attractive.

Her brows knitted together; where had that come from? Well, now that she thought about it, he _was_ quite attractive- well, more than quite, really. But what did that matter? She wasn't blind, she was allowed to objectively observe whether any random guy off the street is technically good-looking or not, it's not like was doing anything wrong, or-

Her train of thought came to an abrupt halt as the door opened, startling her slightly. She turned around and was met with the familiar happy feeling rising up in her chest as she saw her boyfriend enter the room, smartly dressed in a dinner jacket and shirt. She tried to get up to greet him but, as it turns out, getting up is somewhat harder for someone who's been lying in the same position for three hours and she promptly fell back down again.

Laughing, Logan went over to his girlfriend, saying, "Graceful as ever, Ace," before kissing her. She responded happily, pulling him down onto the sofa with her. After a while they broke apart, shifting into sitting positions as she laced her fingers with his.

"Hi," she greeted, happily (and somewhat belatedly).

"Hi," he returned, matching her tone, before noticing that she was still wearing her community service clothes. "Hey, how come you aren't dressed?"

"What for?" she asked, confusion clouding her expression.

"Dinner, remember? We were gonna have a nice, quiet romantic evening immediately spoiled by the presence of Colin and Finn, it was a good plan."

"Oh, right, sorry, I guess I just got distracted," Rory said, as the plan for that night slowly came back to her.

Logan raised his eyebrows, "So, which book was it that got you so distracted?"

"You think you know me pretty well, don't you, Huntzberger?" she replied with a teasing grin.

"No, I _know_ I know you _very_ well, Gilmore," he returned. "Are you gonna tell me, or...?"

Defeated, she pulled out the book in question and passed it to him before pulling her knees up onto the sofa and leaning into his shoulder as he wrapped an arm around her.

He looked surprised, "Hemingway? I thought you hated the guy."

"Yeah, me too," Rory replied, thoughtfully.

"Care to fill in the blanks for me, Ace?"

"Kind of a weird story," she began. "Yesterday I ended up getting into a verbal slanging match with a guy who stole my garbage picker-"

"Not Don!" he gasped in a tone of mock-horror.

"Exactly!" Rory replied, grinning. "Anyway, today I got there and he'd returned Don, and left this as well, by way as peace offering, I guess. So, I got back and had nothing else to do, so decided to give old Ernest a second chance, and it turns out he's not so bad a second time around," she explained, conveniently leaving out a description of the margin notes. For some reason she felt she'd rather keep them private.

"Ah, so you won't give him another chance under my suggestion, but a mysterious stranger recommends Hemingway and suddenly you're his biggest fan? Is there something I should know about?" Logan joked, his tone light and teasing.

Rory smirked back, "Yes, that's exactly it. We're eloping tomorrow; I thought this'd be the best way to tell you."

"Oh, I'm devastated," Logan returned, pulling her in for another kiss.

She melted against him, having missed him throughout her long day of manual labour. She pulled them back down into a horizontal position as the kiss deepened, her hands combing through his hair. She broke off for a minute, panting slightly, to ask, "Hey, about those dinner plans..."

"Yeah?" he asked before quickly stealing another kiss.

"They're not completely-" kiss "-urgent-" kiss "-are they?"

"I think the restaurant can survive without us," he said, moving his attentions to her neck. "I don't know about Colin and Finn, though."

"I'm afraid we'll just have to risk it," Rory grinned, pulling his mouth back to hers as she let them sink back further onto the couch.

* * *

Much to Rory's surprise, the next time she emerged from the community service cloakroom the first face she saw was the one which had been flitting through her mind for the last two days. Well, that wasn't exactly true; technically, the first thing that she saw was his back, as he half-heartedly speared garbage from a distance.

The enjoyable hours she'd spent perusing his notes still fresh in her mind, she approached him. As she neared him, she noticed his stiff, agitated gait and considered turning back around before dismissing the thought, plucking up her courage and saying, tentatively, "Hi, I don't know if you remember me but I'm the, uh, crazed garbage picker-obsessed girl from a couple of days ago- Rory, actually." Much like the last time she'd initiated contact with the guy, she got no response. Frowning slightly at his turned back, she took a few more steps forward. "Anyway," she persisted, "I just wanted to say thanks for giving it back, and for the book." Still nothing. "I actually really enjoyed it," she rambled onwards, not quite knowing why she was doing it at this point but finding it hard to stop. "Your notes...they're amazing, Jess. I mean, if they can make Hemingway entertaining, then that's really saying some-"

"It was nothing, okay?" he said at last, cutting her off, his back still turned.

Her frown deepening, she finally gave in, walking around, determined to make him actually look at her, for some reason. "No, really, thank you. I was actually wondering if you'd annotated any other novels, I'd love to see your thoughts on- woah!" She broke off, abruptly, seeing his face properly for the first time; there was a deep purple circle surrounding his left eye. "What the hell happened to you?"

He glared at the ground, stubbornly, keeping his gazed fixed away from her. "Nothing," he supplied.

"Oh, yeah, looks like it," she bit back sarcastically, again wondering why the hell she didn't just back off at this point. There was something about the fact that the clichéd angry exterior gave way to such an amazing mind that intrigued her, and the fact that so far she'd only had a chance to glimpse it made her press on even when she knew it was unforgivably stupid to do so.

"What's it to you?" he shot back at her, voicing a question that she was actually wondering herself.

"I- I, uh..." Rory stuttered, before recovering quickly. "It's just that if you get yourself killed we'll have one less person around here to help clear up, and I worry that this road alone is going to take the rest of my life."

At last, he brought his gaze up to meet hers, and she felt a pang of satisfaction at that minor victory. This quickly dissipated as she looked more closely at his eyes, seeing they'd gone an intensely dark brown with irritation. "Look, I gave you that stupid garbage picker so you'd get the hell off my back, but apparently that didn't work, so I guess I'm just gonna have to spell it out: Back. The hell. Off," he said, practically through gritted teeth.

Narrowing her eyes in frustrated anger, she spat out an irritated "_Fine!"_ before turning around and marching off in the opposite direction, doing all she could not to stamp her feet.

Maybe first impressions aren't so far off, after all.

* * *

**A/N: Ugh, trust me, that Rory/Logan stuff was just damn **_**painful**_** to write, but I'm trying to mirror the series and all that, but still...bleugh. Still, believe me, it's definitely going to become Lit, but it'll take a while, I hope you feel like sticking around until then. Sorry for making Jess an ass at the end, but from my experience it seems that BlackEye!Jess is prone to assiness (heh, new word) anyway, he'll be better next time, promise ;)**

**Please review! Praise or criticism, any feedback helps me and motivates me to write more, and it tells me that there are people out there who'd actually like me to write more, ensuring that I don't give this up as a lost cause. Bottom line: please, please, please review! I'll give you a puppy?**


	3. Ed's Lament

**Summary: Jess never went to Stars Hollow, continuing down a bad path living in New York, eventually getting punished with community service, where he happens to bump into a certain Gilmore fresh from her yacht-stealing escapades. Lit. Set around 6x03 and onwards.**

**A/N: Well, look at me, sticking to my update plan; frankly, I'm amazed. But also annoyed at how long Microsoft Word is taking to learn the word 'Lit' and its context in a sentence. It's not that hard. Anyhoo, thanks for all the reviews! See this as evidence that it really does make me write faster to have them, even if it's just an 'Update soon' or hell, even if it's just to tell me what colour your socks are, I still wanna know. But yeah, thanks to all who reviewed, and to all who have read this far, hope you like it!**

**Disclaimer: I own nothing, not even something original to put in this disclaimer.

* * *

**"Okay, so this isn't rocket science, people: all you have to do is drive around Hartford, looking for inebriates and offer them a ride home. This way you're performing a service to the community while ensuring that they don't get the bright idea to drive home dead drunk and end up having to do community service hours, themselves. And thus, the beautiful circle of criminal justice is retained," rattled off the probation officer, Ed, as he tried to remember what time his wife had said she'd be home that night. It was either nine or ten, though the difference was crucial; nine meant time for a Meaningful Talk about their relationship, while ten meant time for him to catch the first half of the game...

"Uh, sir?"

His inner diatribe was cut off by, um – he struggled around in his mind to remember her name – the well-groomed one (which, believe it or not, was a distinctive nickname in the community service line). He snatched a quick look at her nametag; Gilmore, right...

"Yes, Gilmore?" he asked, employing the typical impatient tone of a man who'd spent too long in his particular line of work.

"I was wondering if there was anything else that needed to be done – it's just...I think I'd work better on my own," and Ed noticed her gaze flicker slightly towards, err...surly, silent one, who she'd just been partnered with.

"Tough. You're the only one who signed up for evening hours tonight, and because Mr Happy –"

"_Original_," Jess scoffed, unnoticed.

"- over there decided not to turn up for his daytime hours, you two are the only ones here, and this has to be done in pairs, it's the policy. Besides, you're the only one around here who has anything resembling a work ethic, you should be able to stop-" he glanced at Jess' nametag "-Mariano from slacking off." He glanced at his watch: eight forty-five. If it _was_ at ten that his wife got back from yoga, he had fifteen minutes to get back before the game started, ten if he wanted to grab a sandwich first. Mmm, pastrami...

"Sir?"

Again, Gilmore cut through his thoughts; he noticed that she always talked to him as if he were a teacher; he kinda liked that. However, at the moment, teacher-tone or not, the girl was working his last nerve. "Yes, Gilmore?" he sighed.

"Are you sure there's nothing else I can do? I mean there's still plenty of garbage on the side of the road, I could just pick up some of that, I'm sure Jess'll be fine on his own."

"I'm not gonna repeat myself, Gilmore, just get in the car. Sally'll be here to sign you out at eleven," he said, turning to leave. He looked back at his watch: eight fifty. His stomach rumbled. Gloomily, he mentally bade farewell to the idea of a sandwich as he started the walk back to his car, leaving a disgruntled Rory in his wake.

Rory looked reluctantly back to her fellow driver. "So, do you wanna-"

Jess opened the door to the driver's seat, stepping in and shutting it behind him.

"Drive," Rory finished, to herself. Sighing, she walked round to the passenger door, taking a seat beside him as silence enveloped the two. This was going to be a _long_ night.

* * *

Rory stared fixedly out the window, under the pretext of spotting people to give a ride home to, but really she found the irate silence a difficult environment in which to cultivate concentration.

It was a couple of days after the whole black eye thing, and she'd meticulously avoided him since, not wanting to be the victim of anymore sporadic mood swings on his part. While this should have been easy enough, she found her mind wandering back to the book he'd lent her, leading back to the intrigue that'd led her to start the whole stupid conversation in the first place. This line of thought led to more curiosity: _Did he write in all his books? Or only the ones that were capable of putting a raging bull to sleep? What was he reading now?_ And it was at this point in her thoughts that her eyes would always wander – without express permission from her brain – to find him, to see that tell-tale edge of novel sticking out of his back pocket in the hopes of catching a title. Of course, the situation of this book-storage place led to being accused by Liza of checking out his ass on several occasions, which was frustrating because it was nowhere near to the truth. Well, of course, since her eyes were already directed toward that general area, it'd be pretty hard not to appreciate- notice, but it was hardly her fault, and besides...

She shook her head, realising that she'd gone off on another mental tangent as she tried to focus on the sidewalk. Was that stumbling due to alcohol consumption or was it just a limp? No, definitely a limp...

"So, instead of interrogation you've opted for angry silence this time?"

She jumped as she heard his voice for the first time since their semi-argument. She looked over at him, but his eyes were fixed on the road ahead of him just as they had been before. She noticed that his black eye had almost healed up.

Quickly recovering, she snapped back, "Sorry, just trying to follow instructions."

"And what would those be?" he asked, his voice more passive than she'd ever heard it.

"Hmm, let me get this right," she paused for a moment, supposedly in deep consideration. "'Get the hell off my back'."

"Boy, you have a good memory." His calm tone was annoying her now. She _hadn't_ made the whole incident up, and she didn't appreciate being talked to as though _she_ was the drama queen in this situation.

"Or 'Back the hell off'? That ring any bells?" she asked, frustration mounting.

"Well, maybe you should actually leave people alone when they ask you to," he said back, still annoyingly placid.

She glared ahead of her, gritting out from behind clenched teeth, "Fine, if you want to show up looking like Petey the dog, be my guest, but if you, in turn, could drop the mixed signals with the garbage pickers and the books and the margin notes, that'd be real great, thanks." She turned back to looking out of the passenger windows, ready to settle into the thick silence once again.

Jess let out a sigh. Despite the fact that the fuming petite girl to his right was infuriating, had an interesting view on personal boundaries and – let's face it – turned a hilarious (and kind of cute) shade of pink when irritated, she was probably the closest thing to interesting he'd find during the two hundred and eighty-two hours of community service ahead of him. He braced himself for what was going to be an extremely painful experience for him.

"Rory? That's your name, right?" Despite the fact that she didn't turn around, he could practically feel her glare. He felt sorry for any pedestrians that happened to be in her line of vision as the car drove on. "Look, there's something that you should probably know about me."

Rory turned slightly, casting a sardonic eye up at the full moon. "You're a werewolf?" she asked, drily.

"No; believe it or not, this isn't the beginning of a Michael Jackson video."

Rory suppressed a smile, but Jess noticed the corners of her mouth twitch upwards slightly. "What, then?" she pressed.

"I'm kind of an ass."

The twitching of her lips turned into a full smirk at this, "Oh really? I hadn't noticed."

"I can't help it, I'm pretty sure it's hereditary."

"In that case: tough break," she replied, in mock sympathy, feeling her angry resolve dissipating, against her will.

"Anyway, this, err...hereditary defect –" Rory chuckled "could possibly have been directed at you at some point."

"I vaguely remember something to that effect, yeah," Rory nodded along, trying not to grin.

"Just so you know that – obviously – it was completely out of my control. Blame my father, I tend to."

Rory looked over at him; his gaze was fully back on the road once again, and she took this to mean that his little speech had finished. "You're good at that, you know," she observed.

"Good at what?"

"Apologising without actually saying the words 'I'm sorry'."

"Huh," he replied, still staring straight ahead. "There's something to add to my résumé, right next to the criminal record."

"Well, anyway, I forgive you."

"I never apologised."

"I'm good at reading between the lines," she returned. Then, after a second thought, she added, "And, judging by your margin notes, so are you."

He shot her a swift side-glance, "How do you even know it was me who wrote those?"

"Your handwriting." At his raised eyebrows, she elaborated, "You write like you look: slightly controlled, but in a kind of agitated sort of way," she explained, clumsily.

"Glad to see you paid so much attention," he replied with a smirk.

"Oh, don't go back to the smirking and the indifference, there's no point now, I know."

"Know what?"

"That you're _not_ an ass. Or not a complete one, at least," she replied, in a satisfied tone.

"Shhh...you'll ruin my rep."

She continued regardless. "In fact, I'd go so far as to say that behind the glare and the leather jacket, you're actually kind of a nice guy."

"Oh, now you're just being mean."

"Aww, calm down, _buddy_," she pressed, enjoying getting to bait him for a change.

"Feel free to shut up at any point."

"Pal, friend, amigo..." she continued, grinning at his annoyance.

"Y'know, I thought I'd warn you now: I think this route's gonna take us past a dock. Now, at that point, I'm gonna need you to resist hi-jacking any yachts, fancy as they may be."

She shot him a dark look, "I think your 'hereditary defect' just reared its ugly head again."

"Darn," he replied with mock disappointment.

They lapsed into silence again, but a slightly friendlier one than last time. Rory gazed out the window absently for a few more minutes before remembering what they were actually supposed to be doing. "Hey, don't you think we should have picked up at least one drunk person yet? We only have 'til eleven."

"Sorry if the thought of giving a ride to someone who'll probably throw up during the duration of it doesn't thrill me as much as it does you."

Rory tried to bite back her dutiful, law-abiding (oh, the irony) nature, but could only manage to do so for roughly three point nine four seconds before interjecting again, "But this is community service – we're supposed to be helping the community."

"We are."

Rory raised her eyebrows, "Care to enlighten me as to how?"

"By not inviting someone in to puke in my car, we are saving someone from being thrown out of the car by me, which would either be murder or severe injury. Community served."

"This isn't even you car," Rory scoffed.

"I prefer not to have vomit in any car that I happen to be driving. Odd, isn't it?"

"Look," Rory said, pointing at someone out in the street. "Look at her – there's no way she's sober."

"Actually, I think she just has kind of a hump back."

Rory rolled her eyes, "No she doesn't, she's completely- no, wait, oh my God, she does...ouch, that looks bad."

"And the fact that you were just pointing and staring at her can't help."

Rory's eyes widened, "Oh, my God, I was! I'm a horrible person!"

"Calm down, I doubt she even saw you."

"Are you sure?" Rory asked, and the clear guilt shining through her eyes caused Jess to bite back the sarcastic response he had in mind.

"She definitely didn't see you," he replied, snatching another glance at her. With a sigh, he noticed the only way to distract her from her current mortification stumbling drunkenly along the opposite sidewalk. He nodded his head towards the guy, drawing him to Rory's attention. "There you go, a genuine contender," he said, pulling over to the guy.

Throwing him a genuine smile, Rory got out of the car to talk to the guy, who'd just fallen over his own feet and was now lying flat on the pavement. Jess sighed again; if there was any hope of him getting through the night without something throwing up in the car, it'd just gone out the window.

* * *

"That's ridiculous," Rory dismissed, at the suggestion that _High_ _Fidelity_ was better as a movie than it was a book. Somewhere inbetween managing to get their single charity case (whose name was Greg, as it turned out) of the night to remember his address, and then Jess managing to get them lost on the way there (not that Greg noticed, as he'd passed out by that point), they'd managed to get onto that topic.

"Have you heard the soundtrack?" Jess shot back.

"Yes, but that doesn't change the fact that they completely screwed up the setting: no way was it supposed to be in Chicago- hell, it wasn't even supposed to be in America!"

"If they hadn't set it there then John Cusack wouldn't have been the lead," Jess shot back.

"All the same, it didn't feel right," Rory persisted, before another one popped into her head. "_The Shining_."

"Agreed," he replied, with a curt nod of approval. "_It_."

"No way."

"Are you seriously gonna tell me you're a Stephen King fan?"

"Not as such, but I still can't take seriously a movie where the final monster looks like it's constructed out of _Twiglets_."

Jess let out a chuckle at that, "Touché."

"Wow, a concession from Jess Mariano, I feel honoured. Now if only he'd admit to being lost."

"And if only Rory Gilmore would stop talking about him in the third person," he teased, successfully averting the subject from the question of whether or not he was lost. Which he wasn't.

"Hey, Rory Gilmore's a criminal now, she does what she wants," she replied.

"I have to say, I really can't imagine you stealing _anything_."

"Really?" she replied, a hint of sarcasm in her voice. "I thought I was the type – 'y'know, spoilt'," she said, going back to quoting him.

"What'd I say about the hereditary defect?" he joked, before returning to his previous train of thought. "It just seems like the girl who freaks out at the suggestion that she may have offended some random passerby in the street, wouldn't be the type to joy-ride yachts."

"Well, I wasn't exactly alone, I was with my boyfriend," she replied, frowning slightly as she realised this was the first time she'd alluded to Logan.

"Huh."

"And, I dunno, I was angry and I felt like _doing_ something," she carried on, trying to pick apart her frazzled motives once again. There was a long pause, and when she looked back over at him, his expression was unreadable, "What are you thinking?"

"You just don't seem like that kind of person," he said, his eyes staying on the road. "You should be at a fancy college, with your books alphabetised and post-it notes on your wall, that's how I see you."

Rory was slightly stunned, wondering how the hell someone who until a few hours ago had been almost a stranger had managed to pretty much figure her out completely in a matter of hours. The surprise gave way to a kind of deep sadness, one that she'd been repressing steadily ever since everything blew up in her face. "I- how did you...?"

Jess shot her a probing look, another question already forming, when he was cut off by the unmistakeable sound of several beers, a couple of bags of chips and a few stale nachos being spewed out in the back of the car. Rory held back laughter at his murderous expression as he glanced over his shoulder, silently thankful that he hadn't been able to probe further into why she was there; for some reason she had a feeling that he wouldn't take her stance on everything that'd happened.

* * *

"Well, do you think the community's been adequately served for one night?" Jess asked, as they walked out of the building, having just signed out. He took a deep breath of fresh, not-smelling-of-vomit air, thankful to finally be out of that car.

"If that one guy counts as the community, then sure," Rory replied, sitting down on the grass by the road as she waited for Logan to come and pick her up, as promised.

"You planning on sleeping out here tonight?" Jess asked, sarcastically, looking down at her.

"Yeah, then I was going to go hunt a gazelle for breakfast. A meal and exercise in one, and they say Americans aren't healthy..." she trailed off, with a grin, before replying seriously. "I'm waiting for my boyfriend; he said he'd give me a ride home."

"Guess I'll see you around, then," he said, turning to leave.

"See you." She replied, before calling after him, "And try to work on that whole 'not being an ass' thing!" She watched him as he turned around to give her a brief smirk, before saying "Night, Rory," and disappearing round the corner.

She chuckled into the darkness, the smile lingering on her face afterwards. Her smile widened as she saw Porsche lights up ahead, becoming a proper grin as she approached the car, seeing Logan's face for the first time that day.

* * *

**A/N: Thanks for reading! Hope it wasn't OOC or bad or any of the other constant insecurities that I have about everything that I write.**

**Please review! I was serious up there about what I was saying about the socks!**

**Julia**


	4. Evading Questions

**Summary: Jess never went to Stars Hollow, continuing down a bad path living in New York, eventually getting punished with community service, where he happens to bump into a certain Gilmore fresh from her yacht-stealing escapades. Lit. Set around 6x03 and onwards.**

**A/N: Wow, again – thanks for all the reviews! It's been really great having this amount of support, and it makes me want to keep writing all the more, so thanks so much! Now, to business: hope you enjoy the chapter!**

**Oh, and as for concerns as to how happy Rory seems with Logan – patience, my dears; Rome wasn't built in a day and, as much as we want it to be, Rogan won't be destroyed in one either. But believe me, I have plans...**

**Disclaimer: Yeah, I think if I was Amy Sherman-Palladino I would be able to write a little better than this. But, never mind – I own nothing.

* * *

**Dog-eared library books and crappy coffee and the girl who'd borrowed Watership Down from her in fifth grade and never returned it and sporadic rain spells and malfunctioning computers and reality television and money-mindedness and snobbery and Mitchum Huntzberger. These were all things that irked her more than her alarm clock, Rory thought to herself as she lay in bed, trying desperately to ignore its shrill ringing, and yet at the moment she'd welcome any one of those things if she could just make the stupid thing _stop_ without having to get up. Well, except maybe the last one.

Realising that she was unlikely to develop telekinesis in the next five minutes, she reluctantly rolled over, stretching to turn the thing off before trying to get up. At this point, the arm that'd been lying across her waist lifelessly suddenly became animated, her movement having woken its owner, as it grabbed her wrist.

"Stay in bed, Ace," Logan murmured, blinking against the sunlight streaming in through the pool house blinds.

"Can't," Rory protested, sleepily. "I have to go to-" she yawned, allowing herself to be pulled back down into a lying position "-community service."

"So skip it," her boyfriend suggested, planting a kiss on the top of her hair. "It's not like you like it, anyway."

Rory made an effort to sit up again, only to be pulled back down again. Laughing, she returned, "I don't think you're supposed to _like_ community service, kind of goes with the territory of criminal punishment 'n' all that."

Logan sighed, "Hasn't the community been served enough yet? I swear you're always either there or at some DAR thing, I never get to see you anymore, Ace."

"Yeah, but by chipping away at my hours now I get it over with quicker, and then we'll have all the time in the world," she reasoned, finally succeeding in getting out of bed.

"I'm sure there are other ways of serving the community," Logan persisted. "By keeping this degenerate off the streets, for example," he joked, gesturing to himself.

"Well, in that case I've done enough community service to last me a lifetime," Rory teased back, going to her closet to pick out an outfit for the day.

"C'mon, Ace, you hate it there, remember? Besides, you'll only have that Hemingway guy bugging you like last time."

Rory frowned slightly into her closet; for some reason it felt weird having Logan bring up Jess. "I was actually put on an assignment with him last night and it turns out he isn't so bad after all," Rory replied, smiling as she remembered their conversation.

"Oh, yeah?" Logan said, "I haven't got competition, have I?" Rory knew it was meant as a joke, but there was a slight annoyed edge to his voice that reminded her of the jealous streak that had last reared its ugly head back when they weren't exclusive and she'd gone to that party with Robert. She laid out the outfit she'd selected on her dresser, before, walking back over to the bed to take a seat next to her boyfriend.

"I'd say you have nothing to worry about," she replied, trying to keep her tone light in response while making it reassuring, giving him a swift kiss before getting up again. "Besides, who else would join me when I feel like stealing a yacht?"

"No one else springs to mind," Logan replied with a grin.

"Exactly," she said, conclusively, grabbing her clothes and starting to walk towards the bathroom before looking back at her boyfriend, who had sunk back into bed and was giving every indication of falling back asleep. "So, you're planning on sleeping in here, huh?"

"Uh-huh," he mumbled into the pillow.

"And nothing I could say could get you to get up?"

"Nuh-uh."

"Well, good. You can say hi to Grandma for me when she comes in for her customary good morning visit," Rory said, before walking into the bathroom.

"Okay, I'm going!" Logan called after her, hearing her laugh before the bathroom door closed.

* * *

If Rory thought motivating Logan to get out of bed would be hard, it was nothing compared to trying to get a group of disillusioned young offenders to try and make an effort. There was about an hour and a half before they had to wrap up for the day, and barely any of the work had been done. Knowing full well that if they didn't get it done by the deadline they'd all be working extra hours that night, Rory was trying to get some kind of organisation out of those assembled, but everyone seemed to determined to be about as productive as a crippling headache. Which, incidentally, was what Rory was currently getting as a result of this determined lack of determination on the part of the others.

And, of course, Jess was as useful as ever, choosing to ignore all work and sit against a tree a little way off, book in hand (naturally). After having made the rounds for a third time to little effect, Rory finally made her way over to him in order to find out if she could find maybe one hard-working bone in his body.

Stopping in front of him, she announced her presence with a, "Hey."

"Hey," he returned, his eyes not leaving his book. _Ulysses _by James Joyce, interesting...

Rory pulled herself out of her book-triggered bout of curiosity, continuing with her original line of attack. "So, planning on, y'know, actually doing what you're here for anytime soon?"

Jess' gaze finally met hers in a look of mock-contemplation, "Huh, hadn't thought about it. What am I here for, again?"

Rory sighed, the futility of this appeal hitting her all over again, "Oh, I don't know, look around – garbage pickers, garbage, people using said garbage pickers to pick up said garbage. Take a guess."

"Ah. In that case: no," he replied, his gaze returning to his novel.

Rory closed her eyes, letting out a deep breath of frustration before continuing, "Please?"

"No."

"Please, please, please, please, please?"

"I can say no all day, you know."

Rory snapped, sinking down onto the floor in front of him and pushing his book down so that it was no longer between them. "Look – we _need_ to finish up here by the deadline, okay? Otherwise Ed'll keep us in overtime and I've got plans tonight and if I have to cancel Logan'll accuse me of not spending enough time with him and none of the others are listening! I mean, I tried talking to the others but Rinaldi and Spiro are too busy seeing who can send the other the more livid glare and Liza mumbled something about needing a cigarette and the McFarland brothers just stared at me until I left and when I told Sanderson 'don't be slow' all he did was walk away humming _Last Train To Clarkesville_ and-" She broke off her outburst, noticing Jess' confused look. "Seriously? _Last Train To Clarkesville_? _The Monkees_? What is wrong with you?"

Jess scoffed, "Excuse me if I'm not familiar with the entire discography of some pseudo-teeny bopper band trying to be _The Beatles_."

Rory gaped at him, before springing to their defence, "Sure, they may have started out that way, but- I don't have time to argue you with you about this!"

"Jeez, calm down."

Rory took another deep breath, reminding herself that ripping the head off of the smirking individual in front of her would probably only land her with more community service hours. "Are you gonna help me or not?"

Jess scrutinised her for a moment before saying, "Y'know, there's music store back in New York that I think you'd really like."

Rory raised her eyebrows, her interested peaked, before realising that she was being craftily steered off topic. "I'm guessing we've passed the stage where you're willing to give me a straight answer."

"Hell, you could probably find some _Monkees_ in there, since you seem like such a fan."

"Yup, that stage is long gone."

"Shame there aren't any decent music stores around here. Then again, it is _Connecticut_."

Rory gave up, allowing herself to be drawn in, "Well, that's complete fallacy."

"You know a place?" he asked, interest showing through his chocolate-y brown eyes. Rory noticed that they got darker when he was angry, they'd almost seemed black during their fights; she liked them better this way.

"Record Breaker Incorporated," she replied, for some reason satisfied to know something that he didn't. "It's in Hartford."

His look was sceptical, "_Hartford_?"

"Uh-huh," Rory returned, coolly. "I can show it to you sometime, if you want," she offered, assuming an air of nonchalance.

"Sounds good," he replied, equally casual.

"One condition."

"What?"

She smirked, gesturing around them, at the still-large amount of garbage and offering one of the two garbage pickers in her hands.

He glared, taking it, reluctantly, "Has anyone ever told you you'd be a great dictator?"

"Nope, but I'm always looking to add to my list of career options," Rory shot back, grabbing him by the sleeve and pulling him towards the work site. Realising this was the first time she'd actually touched him, she dropped his sleeve again, embarrassed for some stupid reason. He didn't seem to notice.

* * *

Miraculously, an hour later, everything was completely finished. Of course, the fact that Jess Mariano could actually be helpful when he put his mind to it would probably only serve to annoy Rory over the next few weeks when he'd inevitably lapse back into his former slacker ways, but right now she felt pretty happy as she sat on the grassy ledge in his company, waiting for Logan to pick her up.

It took a curious glance from Jess to make her realise that she'd been staring at him silently for the past few moments; she quickly turned away, but it was too late. "What's with the look?" he asked.

"You worked," she said, smugly, grinning. "You actually worked. And well, too. I'm just still in shock."

"Yeah, well, don't get used to it."

"Oh, no, now that I've seen what you can do, I'll be expecting this from you every time."

"I have a feeling you're going to be very disappointed, then," Jess replied, looking out at the road as he took a drag of his cigarette. Rory wrinkled her nose at the habit, but didn't say anything; she'd gotten tired of trying to prevent various people from smoking, if she persisted any longer she might just have to take up the habit herself.

"Hey, I haven't shown you the music store yet, you still need me," Rory pointed out.

"You told me the name, I'm sure I can find it myself."

"No, you can't navigate the dangerous streets of Hartford on your own, I'm not sure you'd be able to handle it."

Jess scoffed, "So, let me get this straight: you're suggesting that I need _you_ to protect _me_? In _Hartford_?"

"Yup," Rory replied, solemnly. "Don't think it holds the same kinda threats as New York; no, Hartford is much more sinister – you run the risk of being glared about by various members of the DAR."

Jess raised his eyebrows, "The DAR?"

"Probably best if you don't know, keep your innocence."

"Right. So what other dangers befall me in the dangerous city of Hartford?"

"Well, most fearsome of all, you may run into my Grandmother – she can spot a young delinquent from within a five mile radius. All you'll hear is the clicking of Louboutin heels, and then that'll be it."

"Well, in that case I'm terrified," he deadpanned.

"So, I'd be racked with guilt if I knew that I'd sent you out into that all alone," Rory explained.

"It's really very noble of you," Jess agreed.

They lapsed into a comfortable silence for a moment, only broken by Jess' rhythmic inhalation of smoke which, despite its disgusting, nicotine-related connotations, Rory found oddly relaxing. However, there was something from the other night still niggling away at her mind and, she thought to herself, as the new and improved, assertive, does-whatever-the-hell-she-wants Rory Gilmore, she decided to face it head-on, no matter what the response she'd get turned out to be. "Jess?"

"Yeah?"

"How did you know?"

His brow creased slightly in confusion, "What?"

Realising how stupidly ambiguous that question was, Rory elaborated. "Last night, in the car, you just _knew_ – all that stuff about college and books and post-it notes (which you were right about, by the way, I find stationery kind of addictive)."

Jess shrugged. "It's kind of obvious, I guess," he replied, at length. "Anyone who spends more than ten minutes with you can see that you've got "college" stamped all over you: over-organised, driven and, y'know, smart."

She smiled slightly at the semi-compliment, before saying in a small voice while staring fixedly at her feet, "You were right."

"Huh?"

"About all of it, I mean. Before all of this, I was at Yale, I was going to be a journalist – overseas correspondent, actually."

Jess tried to respond as casually as possible, hoping not to stop this sudden outburst of truth, "And that's not the plan anymore?"

"Nope," Rory replied, still refusing to meet his eye, absently starting to pull up blades of grass.

"Seems like quite a specific goal to give up on," he observed, coolly.

"Yeah well, _if you don't got it, you don't got it_," Rory replied, her tone icy as she rattled off Mitchum Huntzberger's words, pulling at the grass around her with more annoyance.

"And who says you don't got it?"Jess said, feigning detached curiosity, while trying to ignore the flare of annoyance he felt at the idea that someone had told her that.

"Mitchum Huntzberger," Rory replied, shortly, the name still feeling sour on her tongue.

"Who?"

The corners of Rory's mouth twitched up slightly at the fact that she'd found somebody who neither knew nor cared who the hell Mitchum Huntzberger was. "Never mind," she replied, another silence ensuing. She eyed him nervously, waiting for the next person to tell her how stupid she was being, but he just carried on staring at the road ahead. After another long moment of silence, she gave in, asking, "What are you thinking?"

Jess didn't move his gaze, making sure to keep it at its default impassive setting. He didn't know why Rory had chosen to tell him what she just had, or what she was looking for from him now, but he'd seen that it'd obviously been really hard for her to do so, so voicing his current thoughts about what she'd just said probably wouldn't be wise. Casting his gaze up at the sky, he improvised, "I was thinking that the sky here's a lot clearer than New York."

Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that that response had momentarily thrown her. However, she regrouped quickly, asking another question that'd been bugging her as of late, "Jess, why are you here?"

It was his turn to opt for the expression of surprise. "What?"

"I mean, why are you _here_, doing community service in Connecticut? You make it sound as though you still live in New York, but..." she broke, noticing his immediate change in demeanour at that line of questioning. His body had stiffened up, and his facial expression had gone from zero to guarded in less than a second.

He stubbed his cigarette out on the grass, not meeting her gaze. "So, when do you plan on showing me this music store? Since it's obviously not safe for me to attempt it on my own."

Momentarily wrong-footed by this blatant change of subject, Rory took a second to respond, "Err...is tomorrow good?"

"Sure," he replied, his tone still evasive from before.

"I- um...do you want to meet me at my place?" Rory asked and, getting a nod in response, she grabbed his cigarette box, taking a pen out of her pocket (she always had a pen) to write the address on. "Is two okay?"

"I dunno, might interrupt my busy schedule of skulking on street corners and frightening elderly women," he joked, his humour returning to him as he loosened up again.

Rory rolled her eyes. "I'll see you at two," she said, conclusively, as she got up, having noticed Logan's car pulling over on the other side the road.

"A _Porsche_? Are you serious?" she heard him scoff from behind her.

She shot him a final smirk before pulling open the door and taking her seat next to Logan, absent-mindedly returning his kiss of greeting and making slightly distracted conversation as they drove on. She'd just realised that she'd been wrong-footed into agreeing to meet up with someone who'd not only appeared to hate her until the night before, but that she'd met during community service, and wasn't exactly chatty about what he'd done to end up there. What surprised her even more was the realisation that came next: that she wasn't actually bothered by any of this.

* * *

**A/N: Thanks for reading! Please review! It makes me write faster, I swear!**

**Julia**


	5. An Encounter

**Summary: Jess never went to Stars Hollow, continuing down a bad path living in New York, eventually getting punished with community service, where he happens to bump into a certain Gilmore fresh from her yacht-stealing escapades. Lit. Set around 6x03 and onwards.**

**A/N: More of the same from me, really – thanks for all the great reviews, they're what's making me write, you're all awesome. Hope you enjoy the chapter!**

**Disclaimer: I own nothing.

* * *

**Rory shuffled from foot to foot as she stood outside the gates of her grandparents' house, five minutes early, waiting for Jess outside, because God knows what would happen if he turned up on Emily Gilmore's doorstep. She checked her watch nervously now and then, trying not to feel to feel impatient seeing as she'd chosen to stand outside a good fifteen minutes early, meaning that she'd now been standing in the cold for ten minutes. She didn't know why she'd fallen into her familiar habit of showing up way too early for things she was slightly nervous about, seeing as it was hardly unusual to see a friend outside of work (as she referred to community service in her head – work doesn't have the embarrassing connotations of the whole yacht incident). Besides, it was her that had mooted the idea of her showing him the music store, and he was obviously just going along to see the place for himself. But still, she felt a bizarre kind of...embarrassment, at the thought of him seeing where she lived, as though he'd judge her for it. Which was ridiculous, because since when did the judgement of someone she'd only been friendly with for the past two days count for anything? _But it does_, a voice in the back of her head whispered, _I don't know why, but it does._

Before she has a chance to fully process this, a rusty car, mainly held together by dust and a crappy paint job pulls up. Knowing that, in this area, a car like that could only belong to the person she was waiting for, she shoots a look at the driver and, sure enough, it's Jess. Shooting him a nervous smile, she hops into the passenger seat. "Hey," she says, though she is apparently unheard as he gapes at the house from which she'd just emerged. "Feel like forming a sentence anytime soon, or...?"

"Wait just a second," he said, scrutinising the house in mock concentration. "Yup, I think can fit around twelve of my apartment into the front garden."

"Ha, ha," Rory remarks, drily.

"Thirteen without the fountain."

"You're hilarious."

"Y'know, I've been looking for a job – any servant work going?" he asked, sarcasm strong in his tone.

"Actually, I think I know just the thing. I mean, it'd be a struggle finding you a maid's outfit in your size, but I'm never afraid of a challenge," Rory shot back.

"I would, but I think my doorstep etiquette would leave a little something to be desired."

"Yeah, an unwelcoming glare is not really what most guests expect when being invited into the house."

"Shame."

"Well, let me know if you change your mind," Rory replied. There was a slight pause, before she said, "So, are we gonna go to this place, or...?"

"I still have no idea where to go," Jess pointed out.

"You drive, I'll tell you where to go."

Jess snorted, "I've had too many negative experiences with taking directions from women to trust them."

"Oh, how lovely: a chauvinist."

"I prefer to think of myself as a realist."

"Well, whatever kind of –ist you are, I'd suggest you start driving before my grandmother comes out here and tries to find a law that can arrest those who park their beat-up cars outside of her house; she'd probably call it 'bringing down the tone of the neighbourhood'."

Jess rolled his eyes, starting the car and pulling out into the road. "Hey, say what you want about me, leave the car out of this."

"That sounds awful high and mighty for someone who yelled at me for personifying a garbage picker."

"Yours is a stupid stick, mine is a beautiful machine."

Rory snorted as she cast her eye over the old thing.

"I'm gonna ignore that snort, on the basis that you haven't told me where this place is yet, so kicking you out of the car would mean I came all the way out here for nothing."

"Are you sure you don't want to have some alone time with your car?" Rory asked with a raised eyebrow. In the brief pause that followed, Rory fumbled to turn on the radio, hoping this car was capable of that at least. Finally being able to get it off static, a voice announced _"And now for a special selection of songs by Linkin' Park."_

Rory and Jess made a noise of disgust in unison before, sharing a brief grin at their matching reactions, Rory switched over the channel.

* * *

Rory defiantly shoved a vinyl copy of _Headquarters_ by _The Monkees_ onto Jess' growing pile of music as they continued to browse together. Jess rolled his eyes, but left it on his pile none-the-less, still feeling elated at having a decent music store pretty near to where he was staying. Rory noted with satisfaction the way he browsed through the aisles hungrily, approaching him with a smug grin, "So, what have we learnt about my ability to give directions?"

Jess rolled his eyes again, repeating what had become his mantra of the afternoon, "Rory Gilmore is good at giving directions."

"Much better than Jess Mariano, who got lost three times when dropping off that drunken guy the other night," Rory finished for him.

"That I will not agree to. We were _not_ lost."

Rory gave a derisive snort, reaching past him to add a CD to her pile, "Fine, we weren't lost."

"Thank you."

"We were just taking an hour and a half long scenic route to somewhere that was around a fifteen minute journey from where we'd originally started."

"Glad you've finally realised that."

Rory added a couple more things to her pile of purchases as they reached the end of the store. Turning to Jess, she asked, "You about done here?"

He looked back at her, incredulously, "Are you kidding?" He gestured to his pile, "These are just the results of the preliminary scan."

Letting out a slight chuckle as she imagined her friend Lane's approval of that statement, Rory gestured to the opening times, "We've been in here two hours; this store closes early on Fridays, we've got to pay then leave." Noticing Jess' expression, she added, "What? It's not like this place is going to disappear overnight."

Feeling mutinous about being dragged away by something as trivial as a closing time, Jess allowed himself to be pulled over to the counter and waited as Rory paid for her choices. Looking at her purchases as the assistant rang them up one by one, he noted with a small amount of surprise that the girl actually had _taste_. Sure, there were some choices that he found a little questionable – _The Mighty Lemon Drops_? _Really_? – but, all in all, it showed a discerning taste. He added that to the ever-increasing list of things that intrigued him about Rory Gilmore, the only thing he'd found to entertain himself with so far in community service. Because that's all she was, he told himself again as he moved forward to hand the assistant his purchases, a way to not die of boredom, and if she happened to show him a few decent stores that would help him pass his unendurably dull stay in Connecticut, then so be it. He found him having to remind himself of this a lot lately.

As they left the store, Jess started to head back to the car but Rory shook her head, moving off in the other direction. At Jess' questioning expression, Rory said, "I've been standing around for two hours – I need coffee." Realising that that had sounded as though he had little choice in the matter, she added, "You can leave if you want, I can make it home from here." She turned back, carrying on walking towards her destination.

Jess cast a gaze towards her retreating back, then looked lovingly back at his car. Sighing, he quickened his pace to catch up with her, noticing her slight smile as she noticed him re-entering her periphery. _Interesting_.

They walked in a companionable silence for a little bit, before Jess couldn't help but say, "Question."

"Shoot," Rory replied, still looking ahead of her.

"We've walked past three coffee shops in the last five minutes, any reason why we're still walking?"

Rory looked at him with a pitying expression. "You never settle for the first few coffee shops, Jess," she told him, as though she were stating the most obvious thing in the world.

"Because that would actually make sense?"

"Because, seeing as they're in the middle of town, they assume that everyone will be too lazy to look past them and can therefore afford to gorge them on crappy coffee," Rory carried on, in her speaking-to-an-infant tone.

"You're insane."

"It's true: the best coffee is always found on the outskirts of a town," Rory persisted, the stores getting less sparse as they carried on out of the centre of Hartford. "Like, for example, here," she said, as if proving a point, as they reached a small coffee shop on the corner of the street. "You coming?" she asked, looking back at him from the entrance of the store.

Shaking his head, he joined her. "The coffee here is going to taste no different than the coffee anyway else," he maintained, stubbornly.

Rory sighed, "You have so much to learn." She went up to the counter and ordered for them while Jess sat down at a booth. A minute later, she joined him, placing a coffee before him. "Another advantage of going to the outskirts for coffee: no lines," she said, before pulling her coffee toward her and inhaling blissfully.

Jess scoffed, "And you accuse me of being too attached to a car."

"Don't compare that piece of junk to the most beautiful thing on the planet," she scolded as she took a sip, exhaling as she felt its warmth flood into her. She noticed Jess take a sip of his, "Heavenly, no?"

He held back his initial reaction to one of the most delicious cups of coffee in his life, shrugging as he said, "Not bad."

Rory rolled her eyes, "You're stubborn."

Jess scoffed, "Says you."

"C'mon, you can't deny the wonder of this drink. Hell, this is the best place I've found since-" she cut off abruptly, and Jess noticed an immediate change in her demeanour.

Furrowing his brow, he asked, "What?"

She looked down into her drink, absently tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, "Nothing – there's just this place back in my hometown that had the best coffee in the world. I just...I haven't been there in a while, that's all."

"Right," Jess replied, nodding slightly, though not really understanding how this had elicited that response in her. "What's it called? Your home town?"

"Stars Hollow," she said, and the corners of her mouth twitched up a bit, instinctively, as she said the name. Her gaze stayed resolutely on her coffee.

Once again, Jess' brow furrowed; he swore he'd heard that name before, though he couldn't quite put his finger on it. An unexpected peal of laughter from Rory stopped his line of thought. "What?" he asked.

Rory stopped laughing at length. "Nothing, I- I just imagined you in Stars Hollow...it's kind of a funny image," she said, with another brief chuckle.

Jess raised his eyebrows, "Small town?"

"_Very_ small town," Rory replied. "Picket fences, town meetings, tree-planting festivals: the lot."

"Sounds like hell," Jess said, sincerely.

"It was perfect," Rory said, quietly, her tone going back to sombre. There was a pause for a moment, before she seemed to regroup, draining what was left of her coffee and saying, "We should probably get going – I told my Grandma I was doing 'errands'."

"Okay," Jess agreed, slightly taken-aback by her sudden change in demeanour.

They headed back to the car in silence, Rory still lost in thoughts that Jess couldn't begin to guess at.

* * *

"Walk you to your door?"

The questioned surprised both of them, and Jess briefly wondered if he'd ever offered to walk a girl to her door in his life, before dismissing the offer as a momentary aneurism. Rory had regained her spirits during the ride home, and had been looking happily through her purchases all the way back. "Sure," she replied, in a tone of pleasant surprise, as she stepped out of the car and started walking with him up the driveway. "So long as you're not doing this so you can ask for that maid position," she added.

He just smirked in response as they stopped at the grand, intimidating-looking door.

Rory paused outside, looking at him for a moment as she something strange pass over her, realising the date-like context that this had taken on. She felt a blush coming to her cheeks as she remembered what was supposed to come at the end of a date at around about this exact point, but for some reason she couldn't tear her gaze away from his. Finally gathering her wits, she tore her gaze away, feeling like an awkward teenager again as she blushed, saying a quick, "See you at community service," before opening the door and closing it behind her. _What the hell was that?_ she thought to herself, leaning back against the closed door.

Outside, Jess' thoughts were similar as he stared dumbly at the closed door. Shrugging it off at last, dismissing the moment-that-wasn't-a-moment from his mind, he began to walk out of the driveway. When he got past the gates, however, he noticed someone sitting on the brick wall outside that hadn't been there before. She had dark brown hair, and extremely blue eyes, though a more piercing variety of blue than the ones he'd been looking into a moment ago. She had both hands wrapped around an empty take-out coffee cup and was staring down at it, an air of defeat about her. He had no idea why he'd stopped to look at some random woman off the street, but a nagging voice at the back of his head told him that it was probably to do with the strong resemblance she had to the girl he'd just dropped off.

He withdrew his gaze, embarrassed, as she noticed his presence, and was about to take the few steps back to his car, when she addressed him, drily, asking, "What are you here for, then? The tunes?" She was referring to the vague sounds of classical music playing from the open window of the Gilmore mansion into what was supposedly the living room.

Slightly taken-aback by being addressed by a complete stranger, Jess took a minute to answer. For some reason, he found himself not wanting to either ignore her, or respond in his usual stand-offish manner. _Probably that pesky resemblance,_ that little voice in his head pressed on... "If it was up to me, _The Clash_'d be blaring out of that window, but I guess you can't have everything," he said, with a shrug, imagining that that would be the end of this bizarre exchange.

Apparently not. She let out a small chuckle, though she still exuded a kind of deep sadness, "I guess we're of the same mind on that one, then."

Jess had no idea why, but he found himself asking, "What about you?"

She hesitated, still looking down at her empty coffee cup, "I- I used to come here a lot. On Friday nights. Sometimes I still just come here and...sit." She paused a minute, and Jess wondered if this was his cue to leave, before she spoke again, her curiosity apparently getting the better of her, "What are you doing here, then? You don't look like typical Gilmore staff."

"I was, uh, visiting their Granddaughter," he said, hesitantly, adding "Rory," stupidly at the end. He had no idea where this new found...courtesy was coming from, but he hoped dearly that he'd be able to turn it off before he had to go back to New York. Back to Liz.

The woman's demeanour changed immediately. She looked more alert, sitting up straighter and looking at him properly for the first time, instead of down at her coffee. Another trait that was similar to Rory, Jess observed. "Rory?" she asked, and there was a kind of desperation in her voice, "You know Rory?"

"Yeah," he said, again hesitantly, still slightly taken aback by the sudden questions. "We have community service together."

The woman scoffed, "I bet the Gilmores just _love_ that she's making friends there." She paused again, her gaze falling back to her cup. Eventually, she dragged her gaze back up, and there was a new kind of vulnerability in her expression, "She's okay, though? Happy?"

Jess paused, measuring his response, something inside him telling him that anything but complete honesty would be...wrong, somehow. "I think," he began, at last, "I think she tries to give every indication of being happy."

The woman looked back down at the ground, with a nod. "Right," she said, getting to her feet and turning to leave at last. She stopped again, turning back for a moment, "What's your name?"

"Jess," he supplied.

"Okay," she said. "Jess, please don't- please don't tell Rory about this, okay? About seeing someone out here?"

He nodded, that same feeling as before telling him that running to Rory about this bizarre meeting would be wrong, like some kind of violation of trust.

She kind of half-smiled, saying, "Thanks," before turning to leave, walking towards a parked Jeep.

Jess got into his car, sitting in silence for a moment as he contemplated the odd encounter, the idea that had been forming throughout the conversation finally taking a shape in his head. Unless he was very much mistaken, he'd just met Rory Gilmore's mother.

* * *

**A/N: Thanks for reading! Please, please, please review! It keeps the regular updates coming!**


	6. The Perils of Heels

**Summary: Jess never went to Stars Hollow, continuing down a bad path living in New York, eventually getting punished with community service, where he happens to bump into a certain Gilmore fresh from her yacht-stealing escapades. Lit. Set around 6x03 and onwards.**

**A/N: Sorry, I repeat myself so much in this thing, but thanks to all who read, alerted, favourite and – in particular – reviewed! I never expected this kind of response and it's really lovely, so thank you all so much!**

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. And am so bored of writing these things that I will make them more interesting by saying what song is playing as I write it each time. **_**It's My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry**_** – **_**Glasvegas**_**.**

* * *

Polish food. Right.

One of the many things that Rory had discovered when dating Logan Huntzberger was that the rich tended to base the fanciness (Yale reporter vocabulary, there) of a restaurant on how obscure the country to whom the food belonged was. Not that Poland was particularly obscure, she thought, absently prodding her "uszka" – some kind of mushroom, as far as she could tell – with her fork, but until tonight, if someone had pointed a gun to her head and asked her to name a Polish delicacy, she would have started to compose an epitaph.

Not that she didn't love sampling food from Uzbekistan, but she often found herself craving an honest to God cheeseburger from _Luke's_-

_Luke's_. Rory took a deep breath and started to run through the motions. Push thought to side. Detach. Focus mind elsewhere. She focussed her gaze back onto her boyfriend, who was still in the midst of recounting some hilarious Life and Death Brigade story. Usually, she would have been attending, happily laughing along with him, but she'd felt kind of strange lately, finding herself getting easily distracted a lot of the time.

Logan, noticing her expression at length, broke off from his narrative to ask, "You okay, Ace?"

"Huh? Oh, yeah, I'm fine," Rory replied, taking a long sip of wine to try and bring her head out of the clouds.

"Am I boring you?" he asked, his expression still perplexed.

"What? No! Of course not! Sorry, I just got a bit distracted."

"How come?"

Rory hesitated. She didn't want to admit to her thoughts straying back to _Stars Hollow_ more often than she'd like them to; if Logan realised that she wasn't as fine as she claimed to be, then she might have to come to that realisation, herself, and that _really_ wouldn't be good. Deciding it'd probably be better to fabricate something, she improvised, "I was just, uh, thinking about something that happened at community service today."

"Oh yeah?"

Sinking more confidently into her lie, Rory elaborated, "Yeah, I got Jess to actually admit to the fact that _The Monkees_ aren't as awful as he thought. It's baby steps, but he's getting there." This was actually true. It'd been a couple of weeks since she'd shown him _RBI_ and, while that'd been the only time she'd seen him outside of community service, she'd kind of grown to consider him a friend, or at least somewhere in the vague realm of friendishness. He'd dropped the surliness – though the sarcasm was still there, in abundance – and she'd given up on asking him questions that he'd inevitably shrug off. There'd been nothing similar to The Doorway Incident, and Rory felt quite happy that it looked like she'd actually come out of the whole thing with a friend.

"Ah," Logan replied, managing to fit a barely suppressed note of irritation into one syllable.

Rory frowned slightly as she noticed the way he clenched his jaw slightly. "Are _you_ okay?" she asked him, wondering what she'd said to cause the sudden change from conversational to annoyed.

"Oh, nothing," he said, jaw still clenched. "Just trying to remember the last conversation that we had where you _didn't_ bring up Hemingway."

Rory gaped at him for a second, before asking, "Are you _serious_?"

Logan shrugged, evasively, dropping his gaze down onto his plate. "Never mind, forget I said anything."

"No, I want to hear this," Rory pressed on. "What exactly is it you're accusing me of?"

Logan sighed – freaking _sighed_ – as if it was _her_ that was causing the problem. "Nothing, okay? I just think you talk about the guy a lot."

"I'm not allowed to have friends outside of your group now, is that it? Because you don't seem to mind whenever I bring up Lane or Paris, and I sure as hell don't complain when you bring up Rosemary or Juliet or any of the other girls that you see on a daily basis."

"Look, can we please just drop this?" he asked, looking back up at her, regret at having ever brought up the subject clear in his features.

"Fine, it's dropped," Rory said, returning her gaze to her plate, still feeling annoyed.

"I'm sorry, okay?" Logan continued. "It was stupid to say anything, it's just- I had a crappy day, and Mitchum's being an ass and- I'm just sorry, okay?" he finished, lamely.

Rory looked back up at him, hearing the sincerity of his tone, and offering a slightly apologetic smile. "Don't worry about it," she reassured him. "I probably overreacted, anyway."

They lapsed back into slightly uncomfortable conversation. Rory didn't know why she couldn't quite relax; it'd been the only quasi-fight they'd had in weeks, and she couldn't believe it was over something so stupid. What was so annoying was that she _hadn't_ been thinking about Jess, he was just the first thing that sprung to her mind when she had to think of something so as to avoid talking about _Stars Hollow_. And it's not like she brings him up _all the time_, she thought, still feeling slightly annoyed at the implied accusation, she just happens to see him daily and so, when Logan asks about her day, he's generally a part of it, just like Colin and Finn were generally a part of Logan's. _And that's all it is_, she told herself, firmly. With this mantra in mind, she focussed back on the conversation, her annoyance slowly dissipating as she began to relax, enjoying the evening.

* * *

Late. Late, late, late, late, late.

This thought reverberated through Rory's head as she tried to run in heels that were slowly killing her feet. She'd spent the night at Logan's after dinner and, thanks to his stubborn lack of alarm clock, she'd overslept, meaning that she was now about two minutes from being "unacceptably late" to the DAR meeting which, in an attempt to branch out from their usual location (Hartford), had chosen a hall in a radically different location (West Hartford). Ah, the DAR; one step forward, nineteen thousands steps back. She'd probably have been able to make up the time, seeing as Logan had given her a ride to the place; but, as it turned out _Great Albert Hall_ was dramatically different to _St Albert's Hall_, which meant she'd walked right into a bingo tournament in _Great Albert_ and, upon exiting, extremely embarrassed, had no idea how to get to _St Albert's_. She'd gotten some dubious directions from a passerby, and was now attempting to run – which was ridiculous, because Gilmores _did not_ run – through streets, which appeared to be getting shadier as she went on. Overcoming the surprise of the fact that anywhere with the name 'Hartford' in the title could _have _a downtown, she began to come to terms with the fact that she was probably far away from anywhere the DAR would ever consider having a meeting. This meant four things; 1) that she was completely lost, 2) that there was no way she'd be able to make the meeting, which meant that, 3) Emily was going to be icily perturbed with her all evening when she actually managed to get home and that 4) she no longer needed to be running.

She'd barely had a chance to process the last of these before her right heel finally decided that life was no longer worth living and snapped off, causing her to fall, arms flailing like a bizarre double-windmill, flat onto the hard sidewalk. Pain quickly started to register in her knees as she touched a hand to them, feeling the warm moisture of blood. Trying to stand, she felt a sharp twinge in her ankle, and immediately fell back down in a pathetic heap. Utterly humiliated, and in quite a bit of pain, her face reddened as she saw a pair of legs come to a halt in front of her. Too mortified to look up into the face to whom they belonged, she stared stubbornly at the guy's shoes, until she heard an all-too-familiar voice.

"_Rory_?"

Recognising the voice's owner immediately, she looked up, to be confronted with a smirk that she was _also_ all-too-familiar with. Jess' expression changed to one of slight concern, however, when he noticed her bloodied knees, as well as the odd way she was holding her ankle.

"Uh, hey," Rory said, lamely, still surprised at his sudden appearance.

"You okay, there?" he asked, employing an amused tone to mask the alarming amount of worry that had arisen in him when he'd seen her down there.

"Oh, yeah, I'm just dandy," she replied. "Uh, what are you doing here?"

"I live here."

"Right," she replied. Recovering from the weird coincidence, she noticed the bag of groceries in his hand, no doubt the reason he was out at that moment.

"Are you planning on getting up anytime soon?" Jess asked, amused.

Rory gave this suggestion some consideration, "Nope, I think I'm good down here."

Jess rolled his eyes, offering her a hand, silently.

She took it, allowing herself to be pulled up as she put her weight onto her good ankle.

"Can you walk okay?" Jess asked. He got his answer when she tried to put weight onto her right ankle, almost falling down again in the process. Jess swiftly grabbed her, putting his arm around her back as she put hers around his shoulder, putting her weight on him, so that she could just about manage a stumble. "Jesus, you're clumsy."

Rory scoffed, "I'd like to see you try and run in heels. Especially evil heels that conspire against you, breaking at the moment when they know you'll have the most painful trajectory," she said, glaring down at the offending objects. There was a pause as they slowly made their way down the street and Rory realised this was the most physical contact she'd ever had with him. To stop herself from blushing – _for God's sake, Gilmore, you're not sixteen_ – she said, "Jess?"

"Yeah?"

"Where are we going?"

"My place," he replied, his expression unreadable as he looked at the street ahead of him.

Rory raised her eyebrows, "Planning on murdering me?"

"If by murdering, you mean fixing up your knees and putting some ice on your ankle, then absolutely."

"Oh," Rory replied, lamely. "Thanks."

"No problem," he replied, then added, "it was worth it to see the Charlie Chaplin-esque tripping over," with a smirk.

Rory gave him a light smack on the chest, causing her to go slightly off-balance so that Jess had to quickly catch her again. "Shut up," she said, eyeing his smirk with irritation.

Deciding not to belabour the issue, lest she try to hit him again and end up falling down a manhole, he simply carried on smirking in silence. At length, he asked, "So what are _you_ doing here? Decided to stalk me?"

Rory rolled her eyes, "Your ego is fast outgrowing the Empire State Building."

"Is that a yes?"

"I had a...meeting," Rory explained, somehow thinking that her belonging to the DAR would be something that Jess either found stupid or hilarious. She didn't care to find out which. "Besides, how was I even supposed to know that you lived here? You said you didn't live in Hartford."

"I don't. I live in _West_ Hartford."

"Ah, sorry, didn't realise the gargantuan distinction, there."

"If you hadn't noticed, this part in particular doesn't share much of a resemblance with _your_ Hartford," Jess reasoned. "Besides, I don't even really live here."

Rory's eyebrows shot up again, "So saying you do is some kind of elaborate ruse?"

"No, it means I'm staying with a friend."

Rory noticed a slight nervous edge under his usual air of nonchalance, picking up on the way his replies grew more functional, holding less of the acerbic wit to which she'd become used to in his company. It hit her for the first time that she was actually going to _see_ where Jess Mariano lived. Along with this realisation, came the one that it was quickly becoming obvious that he wasn't entirely comfortable with this prospect. She couldn't really pinpoint why this was until they arrived in front of what was probably the grottiest apartment complex she'd ever seen: he was embarrassed.

She had no idea how she knew this with such certainty, seeing as he was as uncommunicative as ever, but it struck her that she was actually getting better at reading him.

As they entered the building, Jess asked, "Think you can handle stairs?" He nodded to the flight to their left. He didn't wait for her reply, noticing her uncertain glance towards her ankle and saying, "Never mind," before bringing them over to the elevator. There was an uncomfortable silence as they waited for the elevator to come, only broken by some rather alarming clanking noises coming from inside. After a while of staring at the closed door, Jess muttered "Oh, for God's sake..." and – without any warning – scooped Rory up by the legs, carrying her up the stairs.

Frozen with surprise, Rory didn't protest, allowing herself to be picked up. She wasn't quite sure where to look, eventually picking a spot on the ceiling, starting to feel kind of relaxed by the rippling of his muscles under her weight. The whole day had been so bizarre that it didn't really occur to her to feel odd in the arms of another guy, especially since this was the first time since she started walking that she was able to fully ignore the pain in her ankle.

Eventually, they reached his floor, and he set her back down again, gingerly. They did their stumbling variation of a walk over to his door, where he stopped to pull out his key. Rory resolved to keep her face entirely neutral as he opened the door, but the sight on the other side was still kind of a shock to her. There were a few basic appliances – a freezer, faucet and miniscule refrigerator – and a door into what she hoped was a bathroom, but other than that there were just two mattresses on the floor, one of which Jess led her to so that she could finally sit down, nursing her now bruised ankle.

"I'll get you some ice for your ankle," Jess said, crossing to the other side of the room toward the freezer.

Rory still had no idea what to say, what with all the things flying through her head at that moment. Part of her was incredulous as to how she could ever have felt so much ridiculous, disgusting self-pity when she had people leaving her mints on her pillow every morning. Then, there was the part of her trying desperately not to feel any form of sorrow for Jess, because she knew that the thought of her pitying him was one of the reasons why this annoyingly thick silence was engulfing them in lieu of their customary banter.

Distracting herself, she cast her gaze around her, letting out a small gasp as she saw several huge towers of books on the floor next to the end of the mattress. Scooting along, her eyes started to hungrily comb the titles, surprised to see a lot of her more obscure favourites among them. "Jeez, did you bring every book you own with you?"

A snort came from the other end of the room, where he was still rummaging in the freezer, "Are you kidding? That's enough to just about get me through my stay here before I go home."

For some reason, the idea of him having a home far away from here caused a weird twinge deep in Rory's chest, as it struck her that she probably wouldn't see him again after community service was over. Trying not to think about why this thought struck such a deep chord with her, she forced herself to sound unaffected, realising that this was the first time he'd sounded Jess-like since they'd got to the building. "God, in that case your reading speed must rival mine."

He shrugged, crossing back over across the room with a bag of frozen peas in his hand – Rory wondered why they had frozen peas in the apartment when there was no evidence of a stove on which to cook them, but then remembered the mysterious black eye from so long ago.

"Admittedly, the latest pile is all new additions from the bookstore round the corner."

He smirked at the way her eyes lit up and her vision immediately snapped up to meet his at the mention of a bookstore. "What bookstore?" she asked, having thought she'd already combed the Hartford area for all it was worth in terms of books.

"I would tell you, but I hear this is a pretty accident-prone area for you. Wouldn't want you doing yourself any more harm."

Rory glared at him as he took a seat next to her, but inside she was relieved that they'd gotten over the uncomfortable atmosphere of before. The glare soon turned into a gasp as he pressed the frozen peas to her ankle, the pain lessening immediately. With his other hand, he grabbed her wrist, guiding it so that her hand rested firmly on the frozen peas as well, holding them in place.

"Hold," he instructed, removing his hand as he bent over and started rummaging through a pile of clothes, coming out with a small first aid kit.

"You travel with a first aid kit?" Rory asked. "Find yourself getting beaten up a lot?" she teased, pressing the peas harder against her ankle, exhaling deeply as the numbness took over.

"Yup," he replied, sarcastically, taking out a couple of anti-septic wipes. "Which is surprising, considering my friendly demeanour and winning personality."

Rory let out a chuckle, which turned into a wince of pain as Jess started dabbing at her knee, the disinfectant stinging. "You okay?" he asked, noticing her reaction.

She gave a sharp nod, her teeth clenched against the pain as he moved onto the other knee. She was surprised by how accustomed he seemed to dealing with injuries. She sighed; it seemed the more she found out about Jess Mariano, the more there _was_ to find out.

He finished up, grabbing a couple of band aids out of the first aid kit, handing her one to put on one knee while he stuck one onto the other. "God, your band aids are boring," Rory remarked, looking at the plain-looking bandages on her knees.

"What do you expect them to do? Light up and dance?"

"My ones have _Barbie_ on them," Rory replied, raising her chin slightly, defiantly.

"Well, I'm sure you'd fit in very well with them at a Kindergarten."

"Hey, don't knock _Barbie_, she's a young, independent woman, facing the world with nothing but a Chihuahua and a Malibu dream house."

"I'll never speak ill of her again," Jess replied, holding a hand to his chest in mock earnest.

"Glad to hear it," Rory said, approvingly.

"How's the ankle?"

Rory prodded it, gingerly, surprised to find that it didn't hurt at all anymore. "Better."

"D'you mind if I...?" Jess trailed off, putting his hands around the ankle to feel for any sign of a sprain. Rory nodded her consent, and watched as he applied pressure to certain points, occasionally asking her whether it hurt. She watched his look of concentration, and found that feeling creeping over her again – that of The Doorway Incident – the feeling of not being able to look away from his face, a somewhat electrical force locking her gaze to his. Realising that he'd stopped examining her ankle and was now looking back up at her, she forcibly tore her gaze away, praying that she wasn't going red. "I don't think there's anything wrong with it," he said, letting go of the ankle. "It twisted kind of funny, but it's not a proper twist; you'll probably have a limp for the rest of the day, but after that you'll be fine."

Still wondering what had just happened, Rory's gaze quickly flitted back to his to give an appreciative smile, "Thanks. For everything."

Jess shrugged, "Don't worry about it. You showed me that music store; I guess we can call it even."

"Ah, you see, that's where my dilemma comes in," Rory said, an idea occurring to her.

"Oh yeah?"

"Because, while, as you said, we'd be even after this, there was also the small matter of that book store you mentioned earlier. You see, once I know there's a book store within walking range, I _have_ to go there – there's no choice in the matter. And, since you're the one who happened to mention it to me, you're just going to have to show me the place; again, there's not really any choice involved. It's just a shame that this puts us at no longer even."

Jess eyed her, amused, before saying, "Huh. Guess you're just gonna have to owe me one."

"Guess so."

Smirking, he got up, offering her his hand for a second time that day and pulling her up, the awkwardness of earlier forgotten. As Rory walked to the door, she was reminded of her heel situation by the way that every other step caused her to bob up and down, comically. Pausing, she asked, "Jess?"

He turned to look at her from his place at the door, "Yeah?"

"Can I borrow some shoes?"

Looks like that's another thing she'd owe him. Somehow, the thought didn't really seem to bother her.

* * *

**A/N: Eek, sorry if that was a bit filler-y; there's been a lot of serious business moments, and I felt like doing something slightly less consequential. And I apologise for the Logan. It pains me, too.**

**Please review! As always, it keeps the updates regular!**

**Julia**


	7. Ability for Alienation

**Summary: Jess never went to Stars Hollow, continuing down a bad path living in New York, eventually getting punished with community service, where he happens to bump into a certain Gilmore fresh from her yacht-stealing escapades. Lit. Set around 6x03 and onwards.**

**Update: Okay, so this was supposed to be posted on frakking Saturday night, but every time I try to log in it comes up with ' Error Type 1'. I'm writing this on Saturday night when I'm about to give up and go to sleep, so whenever I **_**do**_** manage to get this up – sorry for the delay!**

**A/N: Sorry, I repeat myself so much in this thing, but thanks to all who read, alerted, favourite and – in particular – reviewed! I never expected this kind of response and it's really lovely, so thank you all so much!**

**Hiatus warning: As you might have noticed, I tend to update this very late Saturday night/very early Sunday morning (UK time) every week, and this is the most regular I've ever stuck to a fic. However, next Saturday I'm going away for a week, so it may be a couple of weeks before I update, though I'll try to see if I can write another chapter sometime this week, since I have the week off. I'm hoping I don't slip into my habit of not updating once my schedule's been all upturned, so I'm kind of hoping you guys'll help keep this fic on my mind and make sure I keep on updating regularly with your reviews, so if you could take just a moment to do so, it'd be greatly appreciated!**

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. And am so bored of writing these things that I will make them more interesting by saying what song is playing as I write it each time. **_**The Turning by Oasis.**_

* * *

It'd been a couple of weeks since Rory's right heel had inadvertently caused her to plunge into one of the most enjoyable book-buying sessions she'd had since her life had been turned upside down, and she found that over the course of that time she'd been experiencing something unfamiliar. She actually felt _happy_. And not just the blurry, patchy impression of happy she'd been putting on to try to prove to herself and everyone around her that she'd made the right choice, but the real thing. Or at least as close to the real thing as she could get while still feeling the bottom of her stomach drop out whenever she thought about her mom.

She couldn't quite put her finger on what had caused this change in her; whether it was the fact that she was honing her 'avoiding Emily' skills down to perfection, or that she was actually managing to make a success of herself at the DAR, or even because it seemed her boyfriend had grown to accept the fact that she could enjoy the company of another member of the male species without there being any cause for concern. Even if there were occasionally bizarre _Moments_ that tended to spring up from time to time. Ahem. _Anyway_...

She actually attributed part of it to this new friendship. Never before had she had someone who'd probably read more than her, and that enjoyed scouring bookshops as much as she did. Sure, Logan could be occasionally dragged into a bookstore, but he'd never really shared her passion for literature; well-read as he was, he tended to view reading as another activity he could reel off effortlessly for school, but was nothing to get excited about. And the only other person Rory had attempted to take with her book-shopping was Paris, and she seemed to view it as more warfare than source of enjoyment (as was her customary way of seeing things in life). But with Jess, she'd found an equal. After that first afternoon, she'd found herself wanting to show him all of the bookstores she'd found in Hartford, and there'd been a few more outings which, in turn, brought with them a few _Moments_ which were swiftly blushed away and then ignored. She also found that her bookcase was slowly filling up with new tomes; ones that had been bent slightly to accommodate a back pocket, and were filled with margin notes.

Their friendship felt kind of like – and she hardly dared think it – _home_. It wasn't just the shared tastes and the sense of humour and the book-borrowing; there was something else. Sometimes, just sometimes, there were times when he'd make some comment about how much better _Metallica _were than _The Offspring_, or grimace at her love of Indian food, or scoff at her boyfriend's car that reminded her, unmistakably, of Lorelai. And while that didn't stop the constant pain of being separated from her best friend, she felt kind of numbed to it when he was around, and that was the best solution she'd managed to find throughout the whole experience.

Which was one of the reasons why she felt a slight twinge of panic when she stepped out of the registration building at community service on Monday morning and, for the first time in weeks, Jess was nowhere to be seen.

Quickly regrouping, she continued out onto the roadside, scolding herself for feeling the slightest bit of worry over someone not showing up completely on time to an activity that they hated doing anyway. He was probably just late, and it was stupid to stress about his absence when he'd probably be approaching her any moment, sarcastic rejoinder on the tip of his tongue. He didn't.

It took about an hour and a half before Rory fully came to terms with the fact that he wasn't showing up. Even so, she told herself, there was no use worrying, he wasn't exactly the kind of guy who cared all that much about skipping out on obligations; hell, he'd done it before. _And showed up the next day with a fresh black eye_, said a voice in the back of her mind. She stabbed at a piece of garbage with unwarranted vigour.

When he didn't show up the next day, she had to double her efforts to suppress her concern. The day after that, panic ensued.

"Cool it with that garbage picker, Gilmore!" the community service worker, Ed, called to her, after seeing her take out her worry on an unsuspecting Styrofoam soda cup.

"Oh, uh, sorry sir," Rory replied, blushing slightly, before getting back to her work, uttering a mental apology to Don. After a small internal battle, she turned back around, approaching Ed. "Sir?"

"Yes, Gilmore?" he replied, looking down at his clipboard, distracted.

"Do you know where Jess is? I haven't seen him for the last couple of days."

"Mariano? Beats me, he's supposed to have been working all week. I'll give him 'til the end of the week, and if the punk hasn't decided to turn up by then, I'll make a couple of calls."

"Okay," Rory replied, feeling slightly disheartened, before going back over to her work.

Annoyed at herself for feeling this worried about someone who she'd only known for a fairly short period of time, she made a resolution. _'Til the end of the week_, she thought. If he wasn't back before then, she'd go to his apartment and see what was going on.

* * *

She lasted until Thursday.

Thankful that he'd actually given her his address the last time they'd met up, she'd managed to find his place without sustaining any ankle injuries this time. She climbed the stairs, trying not to think of when she'd been carried up them, and stopped outside his door. She stared at it for a second, silently praying that his mysterious roommate wouldn't answer the door, before giving a tentative tap. Her breath hitched in her throat as she heard movement from the other side of the door, and then there was a stumbling noise and the unmistakable utterance of a curse.

Rory's heart leapt with relief. Cursing or not, she'd _recognised_ that voice, and she had no idea how to justify to herself the inordinate weight she felt lifting off her shoulders as she realised that he was _there_, and, from the sounds of things, okay. She didn't have time to ponder this feeling before the door opened and she was too engulfed by horror to feel anything else.

Sure enough, there he was, or at least what was left of him. The entire right side of his face looked bruised and battered beyond belief, there was a gash in his right arm, which he was using to lean heavily against the door frame, and his left arm was pressed against his torso which, by his rather ragged breathing, Rory guessed was just as bruised as his face.

His expression, which had initially shown surprise, and then discomfort at her being there, quickly reverted to its usual unreadable self. "Hey," he said, in his trademark casual way, as if there was nothing wrong in the world.

All Rory could do was gape at him, the initial shock turning into concern, sharper than it had been all week when all she had was vague black eye related imaginings. At long last, she managed to stutter out, "What the hell happened?"

"Nothin'," was all she got in reply, and she couldn't believe that she actually heard _annoyance_ in his voice as he backed away into his apartment, supposedly so that she could come in after him. She followed him in, shutting the door behind her.

"_Nothing_?" Rory repeated, incredulous. "How can you possibly call that _nothing_? Have you _seen_ yourself?"

"Jeez," Jess said, turning his back on her to limp back over to his mattress where he'd left the pack of peas that'd been used on Rory's ankle. He pressed it to his face, saying, "Y'know, when you overreact to things, you can actually hear the italics in your voice?"

Rory slowly felt all her concern morph into frustration as she stormed over to stand in front of him. "You think I'm _overreacting_?" she asked, infuriated to find herself emphasising words again, proving what he'd just said right.

"Yup," he replied, annoyingly calm as ever. He stood up so that he was eye level with her again, "Not everything is this huge deal that you seem to think it is."

"For the love of God, just look at yourself!" Rory shot back, not backing away despite the fact that they were now uncomfortably close. "You need help, Jess!" she said. At the glare she got in response, she made a conscious effort to calm down her voice, as she pulled out her phone, "Look, I'm going to call the hospital, it looks you might have broken a rib or-"

"No!" he said, suddenly, breaking his calm demeanour for the first time.

Rory stared back at him, blankly, "I don't get it, is this some kind of pride thing? Because I find it hard to believe that someone as smart as you would just ignore the help that you clearly need just because of stupid pride! C'mon, Jess, just let me call this hospital, please."

At this, he snapped, all calmness dropped, as he shot back, "Rory, will you please just _butt out_? I did not invite you here to start passing judgement on a situation that _I'm_ handling!"

Rory scoffed, "You call this 'handling'? Y'know, I was fine with you not telling me why you're here, or what you did, or why you carry around a first aid kit and know exactly how to treat injuries, but the whole mysterious act is getting pretty old now, so will you just tell me what the _hell_ happened to you, and why you're refusing help that you clearly need?"

"Did it ever occur to you that none of that stuff is your business?" he returned, his voice low and dangerous. "That just because you're _Rory Gilmore_ doesn't mean you're entitled to know every single detail of other people's lives?"

"We're friends, Jess!" Rory cried, frustrated. "Or at least I thought we were! And as your friend, yeah, I do think that I have some right to know what the hell happened when you come to the door looking half dead, or what you're doing living like _this_," she gestured around her, "when you're one of the smartest people I've ever met!"

"Oh, so you're passing judgement on the way I live now, too? Shall I add it to the list?"

Rory was about to backtrack, before changing her mind, and continuing, "You know what? I am! Because you can do _better_ than this, Jess! And just because you've got some stupid Kurt Cobain complex doesn't mean that I can just ignore that! But if you refuse to tell me _anything_ about yourself _ever_ then I guess I'll have to. _I_ thought we were friends, or at least some variation of the word, but apparently not," she finished, turning to leave.

"I suppose this superior examination of yours doesn't extend to yourself," came his voice, recapturing his cool again, from behind her.

"What?" she spat out, stopping without turning around.

"This whole 'you can do better', 'believe in yourself' crap that you're spewing; I guess it only applies to other people."

She turned back around, half way to the door, "What are you talking about?"

"The whole hypocrisy of you trying to tell me that _my_ life's messed up, when you've torn yours apart for yourself," he said, his tone acidic.

Rory felt as though the air had been knocked out of her. "What?" she asked again, quietly, praying that she wasn't about to hear what she thought she was.

"This whole life you're living! Dropping out of Yale, because, what? Some rich guy in an office tells you that you don't 'got it'? It's pathetic, Rory!"

"Stop," she said quietly, willing tears not to spring up in her eyes.

"Hiding out in that ridiculous house, organising functions, palling around with your boyfriend in his Porsche, it's – it's below you, that's what it is," he spat at her.

"Stop it!" she repeated, more forcefully, feeling angry tears threatening to spill.

"And all for what? Because you're _scared_. You're scared you can't prove him wrong, so much so that you're not even _trying_ because, when it comes down to it, you're just a coward," he finished.

Rory couldn't help it; an angry tear made its way down her cheek as she stared at him, reeling from having all of her doubts from the past few months thrown back in her face. "Go to hell," she muttered, acidly, before storming out, only just hearing the "Right back atcha!" hurled back at her before she slammed the door behind her, running down the stairs and out of the building. Once out, she felt her anger start to dissipate slightly, leaving only exhaustion as she collapsed onto the wall outside, letting out a few convulsive sobs.

* * *

It had taken her an hour or so to calm down enough to call Logan to come pick her up, seeing as the cab ride there from community service had left her short of cash so she had no other ride home. During that time, she thanked God that Jess never emerged from the building, because her varying emotions of concern, fury, hurt and the terrifying thought that he was right threatened to tear her apart. Once the tears had stopped coming, she'd just stared at her shoes, trying to stop all of his words doing a conga line around her brain. _It'll all be better once Logan gets here_, she told herself. He'd reassure her that she was doing the right thing. He was her boyfriend, he was the one that she could depend upon _not_ to be a secretive asshole, he was the one that she wanted to be with. Everything'll be better once Logan gets here.

However, when the Porsche pulled up outside the building, she didn't feel the burst of relief she'd been expecting. All she felt was hollowness as Jess' words _palling around with your boyfriend in his Porsche_ resounded around her brain once again. Trying to hide what she was feeling, she got in the Porsche. Thankfully, he didn't ask what she was doing there, just greeted her, which she returned, feebly. She was grateful that he didn't bring up the red rims around her eyes, or the fact that she'd barely said a word as they drove on. Maybe he did understand her after all; he'd understand that she was doing the right thing.

This thought in mind, she asked, "Hey, Logan?"

"Yeah, Ace?"

"You don't think- I'm doing the right thing, aren't I? Taking some time off, doing all this DAR stuff; it's me, isn't it?"

He shot her a reassuring grin, "Hey, it means I'm seeing a hell of a lot more of you, so I'm not complaining, Ace."

Rory frowned out the window slightly, not feeling the reassurance she'd wanted. "But you don't think I'm wasting my time?" she pressed.

"Why would I think that?"

"I don't know, it's just- all the drinking, the partying; sometimes I wonder what the point is."

Logan clenched his jaw, slightly, the beginning signs of annoyance showing, "Okay, when did this become a passive aggressive jibe at me?"

Rory turned around to him, surprised, "What? Logan, I never meant-"

"You choose to drink, and you choose to party, Rory, when I ask you to come out, you can say no," he pressed on, and Rory wondered how she'd managed to be dragged into a fight with a second important guy in her life in one day.

"Don't you think it's all we do?" she asked, quietly, playing with a thread on her sleeve.

"Where the hell is this coming from? You've been fine about this for months, why are you suddenly questioning all this now?"

Rory snorted, "You think I've been _fine_? I miss it, okay? I miss Yale! Hell, I miss my town, I miss my mother!"

"Oh, so all the time we've spent together since you left Yale, you've just been lying to me? Pretending to be fine, when really you're just waiting to blame me for dragging you down into this awful world where you get to drink and party and do whatever the hell you want?"

Rory sighed in frustration, "That's not what I'm saying! Just- just tell me I'm doing the right thing! Please, Logan!"

He cast her a long side look before returning his gaze to the road. "Where is all of this coming from?" he repeated, evading the question.

She looked back out of the window, still playing with the thread of her sleeve, "Nowhere, just something a friend said."

At this Logan let out a humourless laugh, "Oh, and let me guess which friend that was."

Rory groaned, too tired to get into this fight again, "Please, Logan, not this again."

"What, Rory? You think I don't notice? All the time you spend at community service-"

"I'm working off my hours!"

"-those random trips out to bookstores-"

"He's my friend!"

"-all those books you're getting with those _adorable_ looking margin notes?"

"You've been looking through my books?" she asked, incredulously.

"I just think you need to come to terms with the fact that you feel something for this guy, and it's so insultingly _obvious_."

"Can't you see that this is all in your head?" Rory asked, ignoring the mental flashbacks of various _Moments_ that sprang to mind. "Can't you see that this is just jealousy?"

They finally pulled up outside her Grandparents' house. Logan sighed, looking over at her. "Whatever. Whatever you say," he said, at length, and it was more mutual exhaustion than any kind of resolution.

Rory sighed, feeling her tiredness begin to engulf her, "Look, it's my Birthday party next week, are you still coming?"

"I guess I have to, don't I?" he said, in a flat tone that didn't expect an answer, not meeting her eye.

"I'll see you then," Rory let out in a sigh, stepping out of the car. She slumped down onto the doorstep as the car pulled out of the driveway, her head falling into her hands as she wondered how the hell she'd gotten so good at alienating all the people in the world that were important to her.

* * *

**A/N: Gah. Man, do I not like fights. Mainly because I like everyone to get along and be happy and then preferably drink a cup of tea at some point (I'm British, you can't blame me). But yeah, I hope I did a somewhat convincing go of it.**

**Coming up: next chapter is the one where we actually learn what Jess did! Well, not we, I already kind of know, but...yeah, I'm rambling. Anyway, as I mentioned up top, this may come sometime this week, or after two weeks, because I'll be doing work experience in Germany next week. And the main way that you can make sure that I don't lose my updating routine because of this hiatus is to review and remind me to get off my ass and write! So please do, it keeps the updates coming!**

**Julia**


	8. A Painful Case

**Summary: Jess never went to Stars Hollow, continuing down a bad path living in New York, eventually getting punished with community service, where he happens to bump into a certain Gilmore fresh from her yacht-stealing escapades. Lit. Set around 6x03 and onwards.**

**A/N: Hi! Long time no see! I do not accept sole blame – first of all, there was Germany, then there was people inviting me out on a Saturday night, and **_**now**_** there're exams. So, yeah, I'm sorry that I can't be as frequent as I usually am at the moment, but blame AS Levels – I tend to. I'm not sure how many updates you can expect from me until all my exams are over but, come June 20****th**** they'll be finished and I'll be back to once a week and, until then, I'll just see how much I can do. As usual, thanks for all the reviews – this message may get repetitive, but my gratefulness pretty much grows every time so thank you, thank you, thank you! By the way, just a word of warning: I **_**am**_** completely exhausted at the moment, from a day full of revision and one job interview, so if everything comes out in 'blah', let me know, will ya?**

**Disclaimer: I own nothing.**

* * *

Jess drummed his fingers against the dashboard as he sat outside the Gilmore mansion, trying to make himself believe that he wasn't being pathetic.

True, there was no denying now that Rory Gilmore had some kind of bizarre effect on him and, if he was being entirely honest (which he rarely was), he'd go as far to say that he actually cared about the girl. That statement might not seem to hold a lot of weight, but for someone who'd referred to his mother by her first name since the age of four years, two months and eight days, admitting to sort-of, kind-of caring about _anyone _was pretty huge. One small step for mankind, one Logan-Huntzberger's-ego-sized leap for Jess Mariano. Some might say that mocking someone you've never met in your inner diatribe might indicate some kind of jealousy, but those people obviously hadn't seen the guy's _car_. Sometimes you can just tell.

Anyway, what exactly had prompted the Gilmore Effect, whether it was some odd chemical imbalance, or the fact that she was the only person he'd actually been able to talk to about things that interested him, he wasn't exactly sure. He guessed the fact that she wasn't exactly bad to look at – _cough, understatement _– didn't hurt either. All he knew was that, however improbable, a neurotic, extremely well-read brunette, obsessed with trying to make him listen to _The Monkees_ had somehow become a lasting fixture in his life. As what might have been called a friendship had progressed, he'd done a pretty good job of smothering any kind of feeling, telling himself that she was just like any other person in his life: interchangeable. And so, after their little shouting match at his place, he'd shrugged it off, dismissing it as one of the many screw ups in his life that, in a few short weeks, he'd be able to leave behind anyway. It's not like he cared that much, anyway, right?

Wrong. Because, around about the exact time the door had slammed behind her, a nasty feeling of regret had crept upon him, and he hadn't managed to shake it since then. And, to make matters worse, he actually _missed _her. During the next week of community service, he'd gone back to working as far as possible from the rest of the group, doing as little work as possible, and he found himself actually _wanting _her to come over and start bugging him to work harder. But instead, she'd stayed as far away from him as she could, without actually receding into the next state. And it wasn't just community service: he couldn't go around _bookshops_ anymore. On second thought, that's probably what hit him the hardest; at whatever stage in his life he'd been in, he'd always been able to clear his head by burying it in promising literature, but no, he kept expecting to see a dark head perusing the aisle out of the corner of his eye.

And so, he found himself in his ridiculous excuse for a car, parked outside the Gilmores' place, praying to God that Rory emerged before one of the Grandparents did. Y'know what? Strike all above comments. He _was_ pathetic.

It was just occurring to him that, if she actually ever did emerge from that obscenely large house, he hadn't exactly planned as far as what the hell he'd actually say to her, when there she was. Their eyes locked immediately, and the first thing he noticed was that he was seeing them more clearly than ever before, owing to the fact that she'd pinned back her bangs. He barely had time to register the fact that he liked her hair better that way before her shock wore off, and she began to approach the car.

She bent down slightly to talk to him through his open window. "Staking out some real estate?" she asked, coolly, the fact that she was still both pissed off and hurt stopping the instinctive happy surprise that she'd felt when she'd first seen him.

"Yup, something like that," he shot back, matching her tone.

Rory rolled her eyes, his nonchalance as annoying as ever. "Well, don't let me disturb you," she said, icily, stepping back to go on her way.

Patheticness be damned, he stepped out of the car, saying "Rory, wait!"

She stopped, turning back around. "What?" she asked, "Did you think of something else that I'm doing wrong in my life? Because, if so, I think I'd rather just take a note this time."

Swallowing his overwhelming instinct to bite back, he asked, somewhat quietly, "Look, can we go somewhere? I need to talk to you, just not here, okay?"

Rory hadn't finished making this impossible for him yet, it appeared. "What?" she asked, "But this place gives you so much great ammunition about how spoilt I am, you wouldn't want to lose that kind of opportunity."

"Rory, please?"

Rory deflated at the softness of his tone. Truth be told, she was running low anger, since most of her emotion over the past week had been spent on missing both her boyfriend, and the infuriating guy standing in front of her. The exact proportions she hadn't dared try to work out.

With a sigh, she followed him back into his car (to use the word car very, very loosely). He followed her in, an awkward silence enveloping them as he started up the car, which continued as they drove on. He stared fixedly at the road ahead of him, and she gazed out the window, enjoying the feeling of getting further and further away from her Grandparents house, despite the tense atmosphere of the car.

After a short eternity, he pulled up on the side of a deserted road, far enough away from anything that could be described as a mansion that he no longer felt the profound inferiority that crept upon whenever he ventured near Rory's house. They sat in silence for a while, before Rory spoke up, "You wanted to talk to me?" Jess didn't say anything, continuing to stare out ahead of him, despite the car having stopped. "...Or you just wanted to drag me out here so that we could sit in awkward silence of awhile." Still nothing. "Okay then, fine, I'll talk. I'm sorry if you find it so alien a concept for someone to express concern for you, but guess what? It's called being human. It's not exactly shocking that I don't like seeing you looking like you've just crawled out of a car crash, I guess that's just the type of person I am. And you know what-"

"I'm sorry," he said, cutting her off.

All semblance of her previous rant flew out of her head as she deflated. Trying to muster up some of the anger that she'd felt just five seconds before, she managed to say, "I thought you didn't do apologies," but her tone came out as more sulky than pissed.

"Yeah, well, I don't do grovelling outside mansions either; I guess today is just a day of firsts."

Something still made Rory not want to give in that easily. Must be the Gilmore gene for stubbornness. "Feel like expanding on that, then?"

"Not planning on making this easy, are you?" he said, turning away from the windscreen to look at her.

"Nope," she said, her eyes fixed on the windscreen in front of her, knowing that she'd probably relent were she to meet his gaze.

"Aren't you supposed to be the nice one?"

Rory shrugged, "Day of firsts, remember?"

"Guess so," Jess said, before realising that the current silence was probably a sign for him to elaborate and, reluctantly, doing so. "Look, I know I had no right to say any of that stuff about your life, and I'm sorry, okay? I was being a jerk. I stand by the fact that _I_ have a right to tell you – or _not_ tell you, as the case may be – whatever I choose about _my_ life."

Rory met his gaze, annoyed, "Well, I stand by the fact that I have a right to worry about you looking half dead."

Jess sighed, "Can't we just call a stalemate on that one?"

Rory's stare remained fixed on the dashboard, "Guess we'll have to." There was a pause for a minute, before Rory's voice sounded again, quietly, "I...I think you were right, you know."

"Yeah, well, there were better ways of saying it. Besides, you're an adult, Rory; you have the right to do whatever you want with your life."

"I thought this was what I wanted, but..." she trailed off; she already had enough to think about without puzzling out the intricacies of her current living situation. Instead of continuing, she finally met his eyes, offering a slight smile, "Thanks for doing this, and apology accepted, I guess. I'm sorry I pushed too hard. Truth is, I've been going kind of crazy over the past week...I missed you, Jess."

She saw the beginnings of a smirk on his face, "Crazy, huh?"

She gave him a slight nudge on the shoulder, "Don't let it inflate your ego, 'crazy' coming from someone who needs a straightjacket after an hour without caffeine doesn't mean all that much."

"Hey, I've seen you after a coffee-less hour, so I'll take that as a compliment."

Rory bit her lip, "Am I that bad?"

Jess considered this, "A woman used to wander up and down my street nursing a bottle of Cola who has a tighter grip on reality than you do before your caffeine fix."

"Well, it's a wonder you put up with me at all, then."

"My mind is boggled."

They shared a grin. There was a brief pause, while Rory ran through what she'd been meaning to say for a while in her head before vocalising it, "I really am sorry I kept pushing you for answers; I just wanted to let you know that I'll stop, now, okay? You never have to tell me what you're doing here."

Rory was expecting a curt nod in response, maybe a "thanks" if she was lucky, or one of those cute half-smiles where the corner of his mouth quirked up making him look so unbelievably...Ahem. Never mind. The point was, above all, what she hadn't been expecting was for him to avert his eyes and say, "Actually, I- I think I want to."

Rory sat there, stunned, for a moment, before recuperating, saying, "Are you sure? You really don't have to."

Jess nodded, still not meeting her eye. "Just, don't say anything during, okay? And, after...Look, I don't want pity, okay? Or anger or judgement or anything else you can come up with, I just..." he trailed off, and Rory was forcibly reminded yet again of how difficult this was for him.

Rory racked her brain, before coming up with something. "Look, how about after whatever it is you're going to say, I tell you my favourite pizza topping? You could tell me that you, George Clooney and Brad Pitt decided to knock over _The Bellagio_ or that you ran into trouble with Agent Smith and we are, in fact, living in _The Matrix_ and that's still all you'll get from me."

This got a slight chuckle from Jess as his eyes flicked back up to meet hers momentarily, "Isn't it just pepperoni?"

"Shh, I don't want to ruin the surprise."

There it was. The half-smile. "Okay. I guess it, uh, started in New York. I lived with Liz – my mother – until I was seventeen, when she decided that the whole mother occupation was too trying and way too fulltime for her and she kicked me out. After that it was just a case of either sleeping outside or crashing on the floor of whatever friend was offering that night. I was starting to run out of people who were willing to give up their floor for the night when I bumped into an old friend one night; he was only visiting the city, he'd moved to Connecticut a while back – I forget why – and he happened to mention that his roommate had just left, leaving him pretty much screwed as far as rent was concerned. Before I knew it I was agreeing to room with him, a decision made mainly due to excess amounts of beer but also because what the hell had New York done for me, anyway? So I came here, got a job as a messenger, and we just about managed to stay afloat. But then we were out at a bar one night and I saw him. Larry Carson.

"While I'd lived with Liz she'd go through various guys, mostly on pretty early ends of the evolutionary spectrum, but generally not all that bad. But there were a couple of assholes who...well, they could get kind of violent. And out of those guys Larry was the worst. I mean, there were some who'd, uh...who didn't get along with me _or_ Liz at times, but with Larry it was only ever Liz and I don't know why, but that made it worse somehow. With the other guys, it was only now and again, maybe if they'd had too much to drink or I was being a smartass or Liz was being her usual charming self, but with Larry it was just _every night_, and then I had to make sure Liz was okay and that none of her injuries were permanent, or anything. Anyway, just like all the others, one day he was gone, taking a few of our more expensive belongings with him and that was that.

"But then I saw him there just...smiling and laughing, with some girl half Liz's age, and I was already pretty wasted so I just went right up to him and hit him. Again and again. Either I'd gotten a lot stronger or he less so, because he could barely fight back, and by the time they managed to pull me off him he was pretty messed up. I got shoved in a cell overnight on the grounds of severe assault and then, by some miracle, got a community service sentence and was free to go. You pretty much know the rest up to a couple of weeks ago, when I was just walking home one day and got pulled into an alleyway. Turns out Larry has quite a few friends around here, and they, uh, weren't exactly that happy with me. The results of that particular meeting are what you saw when you knocked on my door the other week. And I think that's pretty much it."

Rory stared ahead of her, trying not to show any of the explosion of emotions that were fighting for top billing in her head. After a moment of silence she remembered her promise, a mild attempt at making things humorous which now seemed plain moronic, but she stuck to it none-the-less in the hopes of another half-smile. Trying to keep any kind of shake out of her voice, she said, feebly, "You were right, it was pepperoni."

There was a tiny twitch at the corner of his mouth that could, possibly, be construed as a smile. "Guess I know you pretty well, Gilmore."

Rory let out a deep breath, her mind still feeling pretty overwhelmed. "Jess, I..." she trailed off, struggling for something, anything, that she could say that wouldn't make this harder for him than it already was. Before she could think about what she was doing, her hand found his, resting on top of his knee, and rested lightly on top of it. He seemed surprised for the briefest of moments, his gaze resting on their joined hands, before bringing his eyes up to meet hers, offering her a small smile before they both averted their eyes again, looking out at the road ahead of them. And that's how they sat for what seemed like forever: in a silence that was neither comfortable nor not so, staring out ahead of him, her hand resting gently on top of his. After a lifetime or two, something else occurred to her. "Do you mind answering one more question?"

A shadow of a smirk crossed his face, "Might as well, now."

"How did you get the black eye?" At his confused look, she expanded. "The second time I talked to you, after you'd left me that Hemingway, you had a black eye. Was that- was that the same as the other time?"

To Rory's surprise, Jess actually managed to look more embarrassed than he had thus far as he said, "Uh, no, actually, that was something else."

"What was it?" Rory asked, concerned, already envisioning countless other worse possibilities.

"Do you, uh- do you promise not to laugh?"

Rory furrowed her brow, "Of course."

"You know that dock around the corner from the community service place?"

Rory nodded. "I've driven past it a few times, yeah," she said, not entirely sure where this was going.

"Well, I was reading there one time, which apparently got the disapproval of a particularly demonic swan, and..." he trailed off.

"You got a black eye from a _swan_?" she managed to get on, her voice shaking again but this time due to being dangerously close to laughter.

"What happened to the no laughter agreement?"

"I plead extenuating circumstances," she said, a little chuckle escaping her. "There was no way I could foresee a member of the animal kingdom playing a part in this."

"Well, it's not funny, okay, that stupid bird could have _blinded_ me!"

At this Rory couldn't help letting out a full peal of laughter, the tension in the car suddenly evaporating. Once she'd stopped, she managed to choke out an, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, okay? This experience has obviously wounded you deeply."

"Well, I appreciate your sincerity," Jess replied, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

There was a slight pause, during which Rory realised with a small degree of embarrassment that her hand was still on his. Withdrawing it hastily, she managed to hit the glove compartment as she did so, which was enough to cause the ancient thing to tumble open, a bunch of papers of photographs spilling over her lap. "Huh, never took you as the sentimental photo carrier," she said, as she started to pick up all the stuff.

"I'm not, Liz is; as soon as I got the car she shoved all these photos in there to give it a 'personal touch'."

"Aw, that's kind of sweet of- Oh my God!" Rory said, staring at one of the pictures.

"What?" Jess asked, confused.

"Why the hell have you got a picture of Luke in here?"

"Who?" Jess asked. Rory waved the picture in front of his face; it was an old one of Liz with her brother. "Him? He's my uncle, I think I've met him about once or twice at some point before the age of ten, I don't really remember him – all I remember is a baseball cap and an overwhelming image of flannel."

"That's Luke!" Rory exclaimed again, still incredulous.

"Wait a minute, you know this guy?"

"Know him? I've been getting coffee off him ever since I was old enough to hone my pout to perfection; he runs the diner in Stars Hollow, hell, he's engaged to my mother!" She paused for a moment, eyes wide, "Oh my God, he's engaged to my mom!"

"Okay, this is getting just a little too weird."

"That means that, when they get married, we're gonna be..."

Jess cut her off, "Look, Rory, this is getting a little too _Twilight Zone_ for me at the moment, can we leave the c-word out of this for a bit?"

"Yeah, that'd probably be for the best," Rory agreed, still feeling rather dazed, before something else occurred to me. "Oh my God, my birthday!"

"What is this, sporadic exclamation day?"

"No, I mean, my birthday party's next Saturday; it's perfect, Luke's going to be there, and I need a way to not bore myself to death and..."

"...I hope this isn't going where I think this is going," Jess said ominously.

"_Please_, Jess," she begged, turning the powers of the Gilmore pout on him.

"To a mansion party? Full of rich people? Including your grandparents? And your charmer of a boyfriend? Hmmm, let me think about that one..."

Rory sighed, her smile falling, "You're right, I guess. I just thought it'd be nice to have someone other than Lane that I actually _want _to talk to, seeing as Logan and I still aren't speaking and things with my mom are...but yeah, never mind, it was a bad idea."

He looked over at her perfect embodiment of disappointment itself and, with a sigh, managed to get out, "Fine, I'll go."

Her face immediately lit up, "Really?"

"Don't make me reconsider."

She grinned, "Thank you, thank you, thank you!"

"Just to warn you: I plan on standing in the corner wearing a perpetual scowl throughout."

"Then you'll be being yourself."

Jess smirked, sharing a long glance with her before turning back to the road. "We should probably head back before you make me agree to join whatever the hell the DAR is or something."

Rory let out a laugh, "You have no idea how hilarious that image is."

"I don't think I want to know."

They shared one more lingering look before, with a smile, Rory said, "Okay; home, Jeeves."

He smirked, and replied, "Yes, Miss Daisy," before driving on.

* * *

**A/N: Well, here's something I probably shouldn't be admitting: I have no idea what constitutes a community service sentence over there in Americaland. My knowledge of the subject pretty much comes from one episode of the British show, Skins, in which someone beats someone else up at the party and gets community service for GBH. So, I'm hoping the same kind of thing applies over there, but I have no idea what the American equivalent of GBH is, so I just put assault, sorry about that...I really hope it wasn't **_**too**_** unrealistic, or that it wasn't a disappointment after all the build-up and all. Next time: the birthday party, which, I must admit, I've been looking forward to writing for a **_**while**_**.**

**Thanks for reading, please review!**


	9. Birthday Blues

**Summary: Jess never went to Stars Hollow, continuing down a bad path living in New York, eventually getting punished with community service, where he happens to bump into a certain Gilmore fresh from her yacht-stealing escapades. Lit. Set around 6x03 and onwards.**

**A/N: Hello, you wonderful people! First off: Good luck to everyone doing finals, A Levels, AS Levels, and whatever variations different countries can think up, I'm just about surviving mine. Though if I ever have to look at another copy of **_**Enduring Love **_**it'll be too soon. Second: thanks for the reviews! They mean a great deal to me, and I really appreciate those who take the time to write them.**

**Oh, and I magically changed the plot to make it that Lane is with Dave, not Zach. Partly because I can't write Zach, but mainly because Lane/Dave is way better. My excuse for this is that it's an AU universe...yeah, I don't have anything better than that.**

* * *

"You're here."

This was one of the first indications of what would come to pass that evening: when Rory saw Logan for the first time since their fight, this was her only reaction. She wasn't sure where she should be on the emotional spectrum: towards the pissed off side or the relieved one, but instead she felt decidedly...blank. So, when she'd spotted him in the corner of the room at her birthday party, drinking a 'Rory' which looked rather ridiculous in his hand, she'd walked up to him, hoping she'd feel _something _by the time their eyes met. No such luck.

There was a brief moment where she faltered, and he looked almost apologetic, before she stated the obvious in those two idiotic words and things took a sharp turn.

"No need to sound so disappointed," he responded, taking a swig of his Rory. It occurred to the non-drink version of Rory that she wasn't entirely comfortable having her name carried around by dozens of hands usually occupied either with function planning folders or groping the help.

She sighed, "Please can we play nice for the evening? Smile? Make charming conversation with various members of the DAR? It's my birthday, I'm tired, my Grandma picked me out heels the size of the ones used to kill Sam in _Single White Female_, and I'd really just like a pretence of a good relationship for the next couple of hours, okay?"

"Oh, so this is no longer a good relationship, then?" he retorted, a muscle in his jaw twitching, agitatedly.

"Logan, would you just-"

"Uh, hi."

The couple turned to look at the newcomer and the breath left Rory's lungs. Her mom. Standing in front of her for the first time in months. She wanted to cry, hug her, ask her how she ever manages to walk around in these size heels. But instead, she just stands there, frozen.

"I can come back later, if you guys are..." Lorelai trailed off.

"No!" Rory said, quickly, before hesitating, embarrassed at her outburst. "I mean- no, stay, it's fine, you should- you should stay."

"Okay, then. Good," Lorelai replied, seeming equally ill at ease. But- but this wasn't right – Lorelai was supposed to be talking a million miles a minute and Rory was supposed to instantly feel better and they weren't supposed to stand there like two old acquaintances who'd grown apart over time. "So, uh, how are you, Logan?" Lorelai asked, at length.

"I don't know actually," Logan replied, turning to Rory. "How am I, Rory? You seem pretty good at judging the state of things lately."

"So, mom, where's Luke?" Rory asked, desperately.

"I think he wandered off in the vague direction of beer."

"So, the nearest Seven-Eleven, then?"

"Yup, pretty much," Lorelai replied, and for a second they shared a hint of a smile before they dissolved back into silence. "So, how's community service going?"

"It's not bad, actually, and I'm nearly done with my hours, so-"

"Ah, I see you've got her talking about her favourite subject there, Lorelai," Logan interrupted. "Tell me, what is your favourite thing about community service, Ace? The uniforms? The trash? The pretentious assholes that read Hemingway?"

Rory closed her eyes for a moment out of sheer exhaustion, before re-opening them, saying, "I- I'm sorry, mom, I've got to go, I think someone over there needs...something, I- I should go," she finished, lamely, before walking over to the other side of the room to the nearest well-wishing DAR member she could find.

Lorelai and Logan stood for a moment in awkward silence, before Logan downed the rest of his drink and excused himself. "Excuse me, I'm gonna go find something a little stronger and a little less..._My Little Pony_."

Lorelai's narrowed eyes followed his retreating back. "You do that," she said to herself, as he turned out of the room. She sighed, setting off in search of Luke. This was hell.

* * *

This is hell, Rory thought to herself.

After her third exchange of pleasantries with people whose names she'd already forgotten, she'd managed to get a moment's peace, which would probably be interrupted in about four seconds. She felt a tug at her elbow. Huh, that was only three. She plastered on her best fake smile (despite the way the corners of her mouth were starting to ache) before turning around.

Upon seeing who it was, her expression was immediately replaced by a smile that was extremely genuine, "Jess!"

He smirked, "Hey."

"So, you managed to enter unscathed, then?"

"Yeah, well, I had to don my invisibility cloak, but after that it was smooth sailing."

"Ah, I see."

"So, I'm here, is there any stipulation on how long I actually have to stay?" he asked, looking around himself in distaste.

"None, in fact you could leave right now if you wanted."

"Great."

"But, y'know, it _is_ my birthday."

"I know, I read it on the napkins."

"_And_ my Grandma does have an eerie talent of being able to swoop down on any early leavers."

"Okay, I'm persuaded."

"Though, if you'll follow me into the living room, I can fix you up with a drink and fill you in on the secret exits."

"That depends: do I have to drink that pink concoction that everyone seems to be carrying around?"

"You mean you don't want a Rory?" she asked, feigning shock.

"I already have the company of one Rory; I don't need to be drinking another."

"I think your masculinity just couldn't handle drinking something pink."

"My masculinity's just fine, thank you."

"Whatever you need to tell yourself so you can sleep at night."

"Y'know, this attitude doesn't seem very 'Rory the socialite', maybe you should try to-"

But he was cut off by a shrill "Rory!" as the girl next to him was suddenly enveloped in a hug by a petite Korean girl.

"Oh my God, Lane!" Rory exclaimed, matching her friend's tone as she hugged her back, leaving Jess to stand slightly awkwardly to her side, mirrored by a dark-haired guy standing at Lane's side.

"Happy birthday!" Lane said as they finally broke their hug. She directed a look towards Jess, "And that would make you the famous Logan?"

Rory spoke before Jess could make a rather indignant reply, "Actually, this is my friend from community service, Jess."

A look of understanding dawned on Lane's face. "Ah, so _you're _the guy who doesn't know _Last Train To Clarkesville_?"

Jess rolled his eyes, "Am I never going to be able to live this thing down?"

"No," Rory and Lane replied simultaneously.

The guy next to Lane took the brief silence as an opportunity to introduce himself, "Hey, I'm Dave, Lane's boyfriend, though I'm not quite as extremist as her. So long as you're not an avid _Journey_ fan, you have my seal of approval."

"I guess I should start hiding the posters now," Jess replied sarcastically, eliciting a slight chuckle from Dave. "Seriously, I think if I ever hear _Don't Stop Believing _again I'm gonna start to weep."

"But in a very masculine way, right?" Rory shot back.

"Absolutely," he replied, with a smirk. He turned to Lane, "So, does a hatred of _Journey_ clear me of any musical charges?"

Lane pondered this, "I think so; but you're on thin ice, pal."

"I'll try to tread carefully."

"Well, isn't this cute?" A voice sounded to the right of them. They turned to see a rather irate Logan, who'd just approached them, unnoticed.

"Logan," Rory said, not liking the tone of slightly artificial happiness that she had to put on. "I want you to meet-"

"I mean, it's just adorable, isn't it?" he continued. "Rory Gilmore showing off her little charity case."

"_That_ would be Logan," Jess said to Lane and Dave conspiratorially.

"Funny," Logan remarked. "Rory, you didn't tell me the guy was funny." He turned to look Jess up and down, "Oh, come on, look at you! Doesn't anyone else see how much of a _cliché _this guy is?"

Jess locked his jaw in annoyance, chanting an _I will not punch Logan Huntzberger_ mantra in his head. Rory sent him an extremely apologetic look, saying, "Logan, c'mon, let's take this somewhere private, okay?"

"What? So that I can stop embarrassing you in front of your friends?"

"So that you can stop embarrassing your_self_, actually."

"Oh I'm embarrassing myself?"

"Yes, you are," Rory replied, coldly. Jess chose this moment to stalk off unnoticed, before he was forced to break the mantra and, in doing so, the guy's jaw.

"Isn't that kind of ironic? Out of the people you hang out with you think I'm the embarrassing one?"

"Okay, that's enough," Rory said, taking Logan by the arm, and dragging him toward her bedroom.

Dave and Lane remained standing there, blankly. Eventually, Dave asked, "Do you think it was something we said?"

* * *

"What the hell is wrong with you?" Rory asked, furious, as soon as the door slammed shut behind her and Logan.

"Nothing," Logan answered, bitterly.

"Really? Nothing?"

"Yes! I'm just getting a little tired of watching my girlfriend slowly fall for another guy is all."

"This is ridiculous! I can't have a _friend_? Is that what you're saying?"

"This is what I'm sick of! You treating me like an idiot!"

"I'm not treating you like-"

"You are! Don't you dare say that you're not! If you could've just _seen _yourself a minute ago, talking with the guy – I haven't seen you that happy in weeks!"

Rory took a deep breath, "I'm sorry if I enjoy the company of my friends – notice the plural, since Lane and Dave were there too – it just seems quite refreshing being able to talk to people without breaking into a fight."

"Okay, well you can cut the passive aggressive crap now, okay?"

"When did you become such an asshole, Logan? Because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have even _tried_ to build what I thought was a great relationship with someone so..."

"Someone so what, Rory?" he asked, quietly.

"Childish," she replied, meeting his eyes, coldly.

"Childish, huh?" he said. "Well, I guess you don't have to worry about what went wrong in our 'great relationship', since there no longer is one."

Rory's eyes widened in shock, "What?"

"It's over Rory. And you know what? It's been over a long, long time."

"Well, thanks for letting me know that," she replied, acidly. "It's funny: _I_ thought that we were just going through a rough patch, a patch that we were both adult and mature enough to make it through, but I guess not."

Logan sighed, some of his anger leaving him, "C'mon Rory, can you honestly say you want to be with me?"

"Yes! Of course I do, Logan! I love you, you know that!"

"Rory, please, this is probably the last time we see each other for a while, can you please stop pretending that I'm not giving you an out here?"

Rory let out a long breath, before saying, quietly, "Goodbye, Logan."

"Goodbye, Rory," he said quietly, muttering, "Happy birthday," before he was out of the door.

Rory sat back on her bed, a couple of stunned tears rolling down her cheeks as she stared at the closed door.

* * *

After a while of stalking around the labyrinthine Gilmore mansion, Jess had found a quiet study. After a brief moment of incredulity at seeing a painted portrait of Rory on the wall, he'd sunk into the desk chair – huh, rich people had _excellent_ reading chairs – and pulled out his book. He'd just about become engrossed enough to not want to walk straight out and throw Logan out of the highest window he could find in this godforsaken place when the door opened and he was confronted with a somewhat old, intelligent looking man in a suit.

"What on earth are you doing in my study, young man?" he asked, his tone somewhere between outrage and bafflement. Not wanting to pick a fight with someone who he'd just realised was probably Rory's grandfather, Jess attempted to slink out without a further word. "Now, hold on there, what are you doing in my house?"

"I'm a guest," Jess muttered, meeting the man's gaze, defiantly.

The man raised his eyebrows, "Well, that seems highly unlikely."

Jess rolled his eyes, muttering, "Whatever," before making another attempt to extricate himself from the situation.

"Now, wait a minute, young man, what is it you have there? Have you taken one of the books from my study?"

Jess turned back around a second time, holding the book up, annoyed, "See? Not leather bound or anything. Can I go now?"

The man furrowed his eyebrows, "_Indian Camp_? That is definitely an odd choice for your first Hemingway."

Jess scoffed, "Probably because it's not my first."

"Really?" The man asked, sounding rather impressed. "What's your name, boy?"

Trying to ignore the 'boy', Jess replied, "Jess Mariano." He paused a minute then, at the man's expectant look, added a reluctant, "Sir," to the end of his sentence.

"Richard Gilmore," Richard replied, pausing to consider the boy in front of him. "Hemingway is an excellent writer, young man; an appreciation for his work shows a sophistication of taste beyond your years."

"Yeah, well, your granddaughter doesn't seem to agree."

Richard looked slightly surprised again, "You're familiar with my granddaughter?"

"As I said, I'm a guest."

"I see," Richard said. He paused for a moment, looking as though he was deciding whether or not to say what he was about to, before relenting, "So, tell me what other authors you're interested in; I must say this party has left me in dire need of intelligent company..."

* * *

"Luke?"

After being stopped about ten times by women who wished to tell her just how well her daughter was settling into the DAR, Lorelai had resorted to patrolling the corridors of the house, trying to find the only member of it that she felt comfortable speaking to at the moment. "_Luuuuuke_? Are you in the kitchen?" She asked, as she turned a corner, and heard movement from in there, "Because if you think there's going to be anymore beer in the kitchen than there is in the rest of the house, then you would be severely mistaken, my friend, in fact- Oh."

She stopped abruptly in the doorway as she saw her mother, leaning on both hands against the counter. "No need to sound so thrilled, Lorelai," Emily said, not raising her head.

"Are you okay, mom?" Lorelai asked, reluctantly.

At this, Emily turned around. "Am I okay? Well, let's take stock of tonight's events: Richard is sulking in his study, three waiters have had to be fired for incompetence, Rory won't come out of her bedroom, and-"

"What?" Lorelai cut in, "What's wrong with Rory?"

"Oh, here's the best part: I just bumped into a rather irate Logan on his way out, who just informed me that he and my granddaughter broke up and, oh, what else? Let's see: only the fact that she's decided to invite a criminal into my home!"

"Rory broke up with Logan? Is she okay?" Lorelai asked immediately, concerned.

"Did you not hear what I just said, Lorelai? _Your_ daughter invited someone she knows from community service _here_! Into my home! No doubt he's stealing something as we speak!"

"Where's Rory, mom?"

"Oh, probably in her bedroom, hiding away from the party I paid for and painstakingly organised. And the cake's due out any minute, too..."

"I'm gonna go and find her," Lorelai said, resolutely.

"Lorelai, are you not listening? What are you going to _do_ about this?"

"Look, mother, I don't know if you've met this so-called 'criminal', but if it's who I think it is then I think Rory's in a lot better company with him than she is with that boyfriend of hers who you seem to love so much."

"You mean you've met this felon?" Emily asked, incredulously.

"Briefly," Lorelai replied, turning to leave before something occurred to her and she turned back around. "And while you're bandying about terms like 'criminal' and 'felon', maybe you should remember that they describe your granddaughter, as well. I guess this guy just didn't have as good a lawyer as you guys."

Lorelai made good her exit this time, leaving a furious Emily in her wake. Emily followed her out of the room, about to catch up with her on the way to Rory's room when she heard voices coming from Richard's study, including that of her husband. Taking a deep breath, she entered the room, and then stood in shock as she took in the scene in front of her. Her husband was sitting across from a boy whose clothes indicated that he could only be the infamous felon himself; Richard had been in the process of piling up a few books that he felt best befitted Jess' literary taste when Emily, who was now almost shaking with rage, had entered the room.

"Richard Gilmore, have you any idea who you're talking to?" Emily asked, icily.

"Why, this is Jess Mariano, Emily, he's a friend of Rory's," Richard replied, slightly puzzled.

"And he also just so happens to be a _criminal_, Richard, someone that she met at community service," Emily managed to get out through pursed lips.

Richard's eyebrows furrowed for a moment, looking back and forth between Emily and the boy before his gaze landed back on his wife. "Well, the boy _does_ have excellent in literature, Emily."

Emily advanced into the room, incandescent with too much fury to vocalise for a moment. Jess felt this was probably the moment to make his exit, slipping out behind Emily while she was still incapacitated with rage. As he walked away, he thought he heard a scandalised, "_Richard Gilmore!_" before he was out of earshot.

* * *

"Rory?" Lorelai asked, tentatively, as she entered her daughter's room. Thankfully, she'd managed to find Luke en route, and he was now sitting outside, understanding her need to be alone with her daughter at that moment. Lorelai advanced into the room, seeing her daughter lying on her bed, tears streaming down her face. "Oh, hun," she said, taking a seat next to her and stroking the hair out of her face.

"Mom?" Rory asked, sitting up, slightly. "What are you doing here?"

"I heard about you and Logan, I just wanted to see how you were doing, I can go if you want," Lorelai said, doubtfully.

"No! Mom, please stay, I- just stay. Please," Rory said, pathetically, sitting up straight and brushing the tears off her face.

"I'm sorry about Logan, honey," Lorelai said, putting an arm around her daughter and praying that things would stop feeling so awkward soon.

Rory leaned her head against her mom's shoulder, letting a few more tears slip out. She inhaled deeply, remembering her mom's smell, the smell of the laundry detergent that supposedly smelled of apple pie that they'd seen advertised on a late night infomercial at some point and Lorelai'd decided she had to buy; one of the many smells of home. The detergent at the Gilmore mansion was scentless. "I messed everything up, didn't I?"

"Aw, honey," Lorelai said, soothingly, stroking Rory's hair as she tried to suppress the small burst of hope that she was feeling.

"No – I did everything wrong: Yale, moving here, all the functions, the yacht, Logan..." she trailed off as another sob wracked her frame.

"Well, honey, it was a very pretty yacht, at least you can say you have good taste," Lorelai said, trying to lighten the mood slightly.

"Don't; don't make light of what I did – it was stupid and brainless and cowardly and- I'm so sorry, mom. Everything I'm doing, it's all wrong: I was with the wrong guy, I'm in the wrong job, I'm in the wrong house with the wrong stupid laundry detergent, and-"

"Hey, shh, not everyone can be the seasoned infomercial shoppers that we are," Lorelai soothed again, getting a small smile out of Rory.

"I'm so sorry, mom," Rory repeated, turning to face her mother.

Lorelai couldn't restrain the seed of hope anymore, allowing her body to fill up with relief as she hugged her daughter. "Aw, honey, I'm sorry too."

"I'm sorrier," Rory muttered into her shoulder.

"Well, with vocabulary like that, who needs Yale?" Lorelai replied as they pulled back from each other.

"I'll fix everything, mom, I will, I promise."

"I know you will, kid," Lorelai said, smiling – properly smiling, for the first time in months – at her daughter, trying to hold back her own tears. "Now, I have a feeling there's quite a few WASPs out there in desperate need of cake; two waiters have already been fired, I think depriving them of that chocolate covered beauty could yield pretty dangerous results."

"Would you mind if we just sit here for a while?" Rory asked, quietly.

Lorelai smiled at her daughter again as they both leant back against the headboard. "Sure, kid, take as long as you need."

* * *

After his abrupt exit from the study, Jess had now taken to trying to find Rory. After a brief conversation with Lane and Dave, he'd managed to ascertain that she'd stormed up to her room with Logan earlier, and he'd left angrily moments later. Now, there was only the slight problem of actually _finding_ the room in the damn place. So, he'd been getting steadily more lost as he tried to look for some indication of the room in question, and he was about to give up when he turned a corner and ended up looking at the guy from the pictures that Liz had sentimentally shoved into his glove compartment.

Luke noticed his presence, looking up from his seat on the floor, and asking, "Are you lost?" After a moment of Jess standing there like an idiot, Luke asked, "Are you okay?"

Recovering quickly, Jess said, "Yeah. Just feels like I've stepped into an episode of _Jess Mariano: This Is Your Life_ is all."

Luke's brow furrowed, "Jess Mariano? I swear I know that name..."

Jess took a seat on the floor, leaning on the opposite wall to Luke, "I should probably be seated for this."

Luke gazed at him, incredulously, "You're Liz's kid? But how...and why are you...but..." He trailed off, taking a deep breath, before asking, "Could you fill in the blanks, here? Because I'm pretty sure the last time I saw you was when you were three, and now you're showing up casually in my fiancée's parents' house."

Jess complied, telling the whole saga in as brief and Jess-like a manner as possible – discounting how and why he'd ended up doing community service in Connecticut, of course. Luke took all this in in a fairly stunned manner, for which Jess couldn't really blame him. When he'd finished, all he got from Luke was an, "okay..." before they dissolved into an incredibly awkward silence.

Eventually, Luke broke it, saying, "This is..."

"Excruciatingly awkward?" Jess finished for him, staring at his shoes.

"I was going to go with weird, but that works, too."

"Yeah, somehow I don't think Rory's brilliant 'operation reunion' plan factored in awkwardness." Luke snorted. "What?"

"Nothing," Luke said. "It's just the sarcasm. I remember you being the only three year old I'd ever met to master sarcasm."

"And you were the only adult I'd met who still wore backwards baseball hats," Jess retorted with a trademark smirk. They shared a brief chuckle for a moment, before Jess' eyes flicked back towards the door, "Do you think one of us should go in there?"

"I think it's best to leave it, they haven't seen each other in months, they'll be doing...girl stuff," Luke finished, lamely.

"Crying? Giggling? Braiding each other's hair?"

"That kind of thing, yeah," Luke paused for a moment, before speaking again. "So you're friends with Rory?"

"I guess."

"Figures," Luke replied, knowingly.

Jess raised his eyebrows, "What?"

"I said it figures: you've got the Rory-look."

"I do _not_ have the Rory-look," Jess said firmly. He paused for a minute, before asking, "What _is_ the Rory look?"

It was Luke's turn to smirk. "I've seen a couple of guys like it before: having that earnest, wanting to do better look that comes with a close acquaintance with Rory Gilmore. You've got the look."

"You're cracked."

"Well, as convincing an argument as that is, I'll say this now: if you have fallen for that girl in there, you better be careful, because if you hurt her you will not only have to contend with me, her grandparents, her hometown and the various ex-boyfriends that wait around her to spring to her defence, but you'll have to deal with her mother. And an angry Lorelai is a fate I wouldn't wish on anyone."

Jess snorted, "So much for family loyalty, huh?"

"Hey, have you seen yourself? You don't need protecting."

"And she does?"

"Hey, I'm just giving you the cliff notes version of the speech, wait 'til you hear the full edition from her mother."

"Great. Just great," Jess replied, with a sigh. "Isn't the speech kind of irrelevant, seeing as she's with Richie Rich, anyway?"

"Not as of half an hour ago."

Jess looked down at the floor, the corner of his mouth twitching up slightly, "Huh."

"Not that it matters, since you don't have the Rory-look," Luke said, sceptically.

"Right," Jess said, "right."

There was a moment of silence, broken eventually by Luke. "Jess?"

"I swear, if you carry on beating this subject to death, you can consider this little family reunion over with."

Luke raised his hands in innocence, "I'm done, I swear."

"Okay, what is it?"

"What the hell is the DAR?"

Jess just shook his head, standing up. "Come on, I think we could both use a beer."

"Have you tried finding a beer in this place? It's like finding a parking space in Manhattan."

"Brought some with me in my car," Jess replied, starting to walk down the corridor.

Luke stared after him, muttering to himself, "Huh, I guess we really are related," before getting up to follow him.

* * *

**A/N: Well, that ended up having a lot more tiny little scenes than I'd originally intended. I hope you liked it, and that I did okay with Emily, Richard and Luke, since I find them kind of tricky to write...**

**Please, please, please review! I'm not above getting down on my knees and begging. Even if it's just 'update soon', it reminds me that there are people reading this and that I need to update, which is especially important seeing as I'm currently enveloped in exams.**

**Anyway, I'm off to sleep so that I'm up bright and early to see David Tennant and Catherine Tate in Much Ado About Nothing tomorrow! I don't think it's humanly possible to be more excited. Good luck to everyone doing exams!**


	10. Underneath The Sycamore

**Summary: Jess never went to Stars Hollow, continuing down a bad path living in New York, eventually getting punished with community service, where he happens to bump into a certain Gilmore fresh from her yacht-stealing escapades. Lit. Set around 6x03 and onwards.**

**A/N: Hello! Thanks for all the reviews for the previous chapter, they were all awesome and, as a result: here I am! Doing that updating regularly thing! Anyway, hope you enjoy the chapter, it's kind of a quiet one to counter-balance the extremely eventful previous one.**

* * *

"What?"

Rory eyed her mother nervously as she stood in the kitchen doorframe the morning after her party, grinning in a way that would've made the Cheshire Cat want to stop to take notes.

"Oh, nothing, just everything is right in the world again," Lorelai replied, advancing into the kitchen, grin still very much intact.

"Care to expand on that?"

"Well, yesterday, you were breaking bread with the ladies of the DAR and having drinks named after you and consorting with Il Duce-"

"Grandpa?" Rory asked, with a slight confused frown.

"Grandma, duh," Lorelai replied, as she moved to put some pop tarts into the toaster.

"Ah, I'd forgotten that your Grandma insults transcend gender."

Lorelai waved a casual hand, "Well that's what happens when you leave home to stay at _The Overlook Hotel_." At Rory's confused expression, she elaborated, "Oh my God, _The Overlook Hotel_, as in the hotel from _The Shining_; God, you really _have_ been away from home too long."

"I forgot the hotel name, sue me," Rory said, grabbing a pop tart and taking a bite.

"Anyway, as I was saying before you revealed your woeful ignorance, it's been all too long since I've come downstairs and seen you sitting there neurotically poring over your notebooks, highlighters in hand."

"Well, I have a lot of work to do: there's a ridiculous amount of phone calls involved in the whole re-enrolling to Yale thing, I'm thinking of just giving it up and taking on this community service gig full time."

Lorelai shrugged, "Beats DAR."

Rory nodded, "Plus I've developed what I like to think of as an excellent rapport with Ed, the supervisor."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yup, he actually knows my name now. _And_ it would mean I'd never have to be separated from Don."

"Don?"

"I named my garbage picker."

"Well, naturally."

"Finally, someone who understands!"

"Ah, but I think I can isolate a snag in your new-found life ambition."

Rory feigned a gasp, "But it's been my dream for a whole thirty seconds!"

"But are you _really_ willing to wear that outfit for the rest of your working life?"

Rory sighed, "You have a point. Oh well, I guess Yale it is."

"Bummer," Lorelai agreed, sitting down at the table. Slightly nervously, she asked, "So, you meant everything you said? About Yale? Because I understand that you were upset, and I don't want you to be doing all this just to make amends when you don't really-"

"I'm sure," Rory cut her off. "I've been in the process of changing my mind ever since I went down that unbelievably stupid road in my life, but- I dunno, I guess it was just easier to repress it than to admit to myself that I was miserable, but in light of recent events that's been getting harder and harder to do, and that whole break-up debacle was pretty much the final straw. But I really want this: Yale, moving back here, not having to learn off the name of new maids that are fired before the day is out, all of it."

"Speaking of the break-up, how are you doing with that? Do I need to arrange a time to vanquish Luke from the house for some serious wallowing?"

A slight crease formed between Rory's eyebrows, "I don't actually think any Luke-vanquishing is necessary, I'm feeling oddly...okay about the whole thing." She paused for a moment, trying to pin down exactly what it was she was feeling, before shrugging, "I don't know, maybe it'll hit me later, I probably just haven't taken it in yet."

Lorelai nodded, in that measured way she had that meant she was about to offer a different opinion. "Sure, it could be that," she said. "Or..."

Rory raised her eyebrows, "Or?"

"Maybe, honey, you really are okay with it. I mean, I only saw a snippet of _The Rory/Logan Saga_ at the party, but it was definitely channelling more Sid/Nancy than Nick/Nora."

"Well, things haven't exactly been _perfect_ with us lately, but I dunno, I feel like I should feel _something_..." Rory shrugged it off, "It's probably just taking time to process."

"Right," Lorelai said, sounding doubtful, mindful of the dark-haired guy (shortened from _guy-from-outside-who-likes-The-Clash_, as she'd called him in her head before his re-emergence at the party) who she'd seen her daughter talking to so animatedly the night before.

"So, do you mind filling in the blanks from last night?"

"Was it _that_ much of a traumatic experience that you blotted it out?"

"No: I remember emerging from my room, blowing out the candles while Grandma glared at me from the corner of the room, finding Luke, who'd miraculously managed to get his hands on a beer, then coming back here with you guys. What I don't know is how I got from having fallen asleep in the car to waking up in my bed."

"Ah, that would be the part where Luke carried you. You see, that's what a fiancé's for: part love and intimacy and all that crap, but mainly slave labour."

"Huh, I'll bear that in mind."

"Speaking of Luke, he seemed to have his own interesting party experience."

"God, that thing was eventful. What happened to him? He didn't get corralled by one of the Grandparents, did he?"

"No, thank God."

"So, what happened?"

"Apparently you now work for _Families: Reunited_."

"He met Jess?" Rory asked, surprised, having forgotten about her plan for the evening.

"Yup. They met, they talked, they drank beer; I think that's pretty much the equivalent of swearing eternal brotherhood for Luke Danes, so I think you can mark off your plan as a success."

"Huh," Rory said, smiling slightly, before something occurred to her. "So, did that mean you met...?"

"The prodigal nephew? Errr...yes and no."

Rory furrowed her brow, "And what does that mean?"

"That he took off before I found Luke, so I didn't see him _then_ per se, but..."

"Yes?"

"There may have been an encounter prior to the evening in the question."

"Explain, please."

Lorelai winced slightly, "Do you promise not to laugh at my patheticness?"

"Not that you've ever extended that courtesy to me, but okay."

"Well, during that nasty separation of ours, I kind of went back to the Gilmore house on some Friday nights, when we would have been having dinner there, and just sat out there for a while. Okay, that sounded even more pathetic than I thought it would; feel free to laugh if you want."

Rory was about as far from laughter as humanly possible; touched, she said, with a smile, "That doesn't sound too pathetic to me."

"Well, anyway, on one of those nights, I saw some guy in a _Metallica _t-shirt emerging from the Gilmore house," Lorelai paused for a second, noticing the way the corners of her daughter's lips twitched up slightly at this, before continuing, "and it was too weird of a sight not to comment on. And from there followed a somewhat awkward conversation before I fled the scene."

"Huh," Rory said again, grinning slightly at the fact that she seemed to have picked up that habit off the guy in question. "So...what did you think?"

"What did I think?"

"Of Jess."

"Oh, of _Jess_," Lorelai parroted in a tone that made Rory feel slightly suspicious.

"Are you going to repeat everything I say?"

"Are you going to repeat everything _I_ say?" At her daughter's murderous glare, Lorelai gave up. "Why does it matter what I think?" she challenged.

Rory paused, taken aback, "It doesn't. I'm just curious is all."

"Really?" Lorelai said, raising her eyebrows.

"Yes," Rory said, firmly. "Seeing as he's my friend, or at least some variation on the word, and you're my mom, I was just wondering what you thought, but if you don't want to volunteer that information for some reason best known to yourself, that's fine."

Lorelai scrutinised her daughter, "Do you like this guy?"

"Uh, yeah, as implied by the use of the word _friend_," Rory explained slowly, as if to a five year old.

"No, I mean, do you _like_ him?" Lorelai asked, drawing out the word.

"I'm sorry, when did we regress back to fifth grade?"

"Is that avoidance of the question?"

"No, it's just pointing out that the question is ridiculous."

"Right," Lorelai said, though maintaining a frustratingly knowing expression while doing so.

"Stop looking at me like that!" Rory exclaimed, frustrated. "Besides, even if I _did_ like him, community service ends in two weeks, and I have no idea what he's planning to do after that."

Lorelai narrowed her eyes, "So are you saying that you _do_ like him?"

"No!"

"Then you're saying that you don't?"

"Look, I _just_ broke up with Logan; don't you think it's a little too soon to be talking about other guys?"

Lorelai shrugged, "Depends how long the guy's been in the picture pre-break-up."

Rory carried on, ignoring her mother's input, "Besides, even if there were some very, very small feelings involved, I'm guessing it's probably just displaced break-up feelings from last night that I've superimposed onto Jess because he's been such a good friend and, let's face it, he's an attractive guy- well, more than attractive, he's- but, yeah, beside the point. In fact, this is all beside the point, because, you know what? He's just a friend, a friend I have no feelings for whatsoever," she finished off her rant, somewhat lamely.

"Right," Lorelai repeated, eyeing her sceptically. "But-"

"Why is there always a 'but'?"

"But," Lorelai persisted, "what if he _is_ sticking around after community service is done?"

Rory paused, before letting out a deep sigh, "Look, can we please just drop this now? After this whole Logan thing I don't really know what I'm feeling, and anything that I may or may not be feeling at the moment is bound to be pretty skewed in light of that."

"Okay, it's dropped," Lorelai said, raising her hands in a submissive gesture. "Though if it's worth anything, from the five minutes I spent in the guy's company, it seems painfully obvious that he's into you," she said. At her daughter's expression, she said, "Okay, okay, dropped for good this time, I promise."

"Good," Rory said, before something out the window caught her eye. "Uh, mom, why is Kirk doing what looks like some strangled form of Tai Chi on our front lawn?"

Lorelai sighed, "_Long_ story."

* * *

It was beginning to get quite calming that whatever was happening in her life, back Rory came to community service with a comforting regularity. A comforting regularity that would only last two more weeks, that is. It was weird that after all those hours of trying to get it over with as soon as possible, she now found herself wanting to drag it out, without quite knowing why. She guessed she was just prone to nostalgia.

"Hey."

She was interrupted from her reverie by Jess' appearance at her side. She snapped out of her train of thought immediately, smiling, "Hey yourself. I see you made it out of the Gilmore house unscathed."

"You could say that," he replied. "Of course, you could also say that I made it out of there with eight dirty looks, four under-the-breath scathing comments, and one deliberate stepping on my foot, but who's counting?"

"Well either way, you left before I got a chance to..." she trailed off, wondering how to best phrase her gratitude without sounding too awkward.

"To what? Try to force one of those toxic-looking cocktails on me?"

"Actually, I kind of wanted to thank you."

He raised his eyebrows, "Oh really?"

"Yes," she said. "But if you're going to make a return to your sarcastic asshole ways of old, I may change my mind," she continued, jokingly.

"Hey, I'm the picture of solemnity," he said, raising his hands to show his innocence. "So, where were we? I think you were expressing your eternal gratitude to me."

Rory rolled her eyes, "Can we be serious for just a minute? Please?" At his nod of consent, she continued. "As I was saying, I just wanted to thank you; last night, I actually managed to patch things up with my mother, and decided to move out of my grandparents' place and go back to Yale."

"And this is something I should be thanked for...how?"

"Because, you were one of the few people in my life that saw that I wasn't happy, and actually called me on it, and without that I don't know if last night would have turned out the way it did."

"Rory, I didn't do anything: Yale, your mom, moving out – that was all you, your decisions. All I did was made some judgements that I had no right to make."

"Judgements that resulted in my decision," Rory pressed on, stubbornly.

"You would have always gone back eventually; all I did, if anything, was help speed up the process."

"Look, will you just let me thank you, okay?" Rory asked, exasperated.

"Fine, misdirected gratitude accepted," Jess replied, drily. "Now can we drop this whole earnest thing and get back to the good-hearted banter? Because, to be honest, that's what we do best."

Rory grinned, "If you insist." She paused for a second, spearing some garbage, thoughtfully, "So, were you ever planning on telling me about your little meeting with my mother?"

Jess' expression showed surprise at her having found out, but he recovered quickly, "Well, we both agreed that it would be easiest if we kept our relationship secret for a while."

Rory wrinkled her nose, in a way that Jess couldn't help but notice was ridiculously cute, "Okay, there are certain things too disturbing to joke about."

"Well, there's not a lot to tell: I think we exchanged some brief comments about music, and then she asked me about you and left. Riveting stuff."

"Well, I think you got her mark of approval."

"Huh, I feel honoured."

"Luke's too, from the sound of things," she observed. "Sounds like you just made the rounds, winning over my various relatives."

"Speaking of which, your Grandfather tried to force his entire Kafka collection on me."

Rory's eyes widened, "You met my Grandpa? And he actually _liked_ you?"

"Your incredulity is very flattering."

"I'm just saying, my Grandpa's a hard guy to win over."

"Please, he just caught sight of my book and refused to let me leave without an in-depth discussion and insistence that I borrow half of his collection."

"And did you?"

"Your Grandmother came in half-way through negotiations."

Rory winced, "How bad?"

"Let's just say I think she's one family member that I definitely _didn't_ make a good impression on."

"Eh, three out of four, that's pretty good going. Hell, getting one would have been quite an achievement what with the surliness and the permanent scowl."

"Don't forget the criminal record," he reminded her.

"That one's soon to be cleared, so it's pretty immaterial."

Jess nodded, "Two more weeks of rehabilitational bliss."

"Yup," Rory agreed, staring down at her work as she pondered asking the question whose answer she'd been dreading. "And, uh, after that two weeks, you would be...?"

"Getting the hell out of Hartford, back to a place where people don't get judged for the height of their hedgerow."

"Namely?" Rory asked, the life already slightly leaving her voice.

"New York," Jess replied, surprised to find the inherent enthusiasm at returning that had been with him since the beginning of this self-imposed exile had been replaced by a kind of disconcerting hollowness. His brow furrowed slightly, he averted his eyes to stare at the ground.

Trying to disguise the feeling that her stomach had just dropped out, Rory frowned at the ground, muttering, "Right. Right, of course."

She was both surprised and slightly humiliated at the fact that she felt a small tear pricking at the side of her eye. Huh, maybe her break-up feelings were resurfacing at last.

* * *

**A/N: Thanks for reading! Please review, I'd love to hear what you think, and it helps remind me to keep updating this thing regularly! Next time: the end of the community service sentence.**


	11. Goodbyes

**Summary: Jess never went to Stars Hollow, continuing down a bad path living in New York, eventually getting punished with community service, where he happens to bump into a certain Gilmore fresh from her yacht-stealing escapades. Lit. Set around 6x03 and onwards.**

**A/N: Gah! I'm so sorry! I've been ridiculously busy with my own personal form of Application Anxiety, and even now I have a driving test and an Oxford Mathematical Aptitude Test to be preparing for as well as a tonne of homework, but I've been feeling really bad for not updating, so here it is. I realise that I've gotten kind of out of the swing of things with this fic, so I feel slightly insecure about my writing in this chapter, seeing as I feel very rusty getting back into it, so reviews would be very much appreciated. Sorry again, and I hope you enjoy it!**

**Disclaimer: I own nothing.**

* * *

"Are my eyes deceiving me?"

"Well, you do read a lot of small-printed books in bad lighting," Rory replied to Jess, looking up at him from her seated position against a tree as he approached her.

"But surely _Rory Gilmore_ isn't reading during community service?" He continued to feign incredulity.

"I figured, since this is our last community service and all, _I _could be the one to slack off and _you _could be the one to exhaust yourself clearing up garbage. Sounds fun, no?"

"I can barely contain myself at the prospect," he replied, drily.

"Here," she said, holding out a garbage picker, "I'll even let you use Don."

Taking it, grudgingly, he replied, "I feel so honoured."

"And so you should," Rory returned, before looking back to her book.

"Rory?"

"Uh-huh," she replied, gaze still on the novel in front of her.

"You don't actually think I'm gonna work, do you?"

"Uh, yeah I do."

"You see, I've carefully cultivated a record of absolutely zero effort throughout this whole ordeal, and it'd be a shame to break that on the last day, now, wouldn't it?"

"My heart weeps for you," she deadpanned.

"Besides, what if Ed catches you slacking off?"

She shrugged.

"You don't fool me, Gilmore."

"I'm not trying to, Mariano."

"You can't seriously be saying that you're okay with being thought of as disorganised and lazy by anyone, let alone by a figure of authority. I know you. You have twelve different colour highlighters and you colour code your socks."

At this, Rory lifted her gaze from her book to glare at him, "I knew I should never tell you anything. But yes, I'll admit, I am kind of a suck-up to teachers, however this is community service: I can be as lazy and disorganised as I want."

"Right," Jess replied, sceptically.

"You'll see," Rory persisted, looking up at him, stubbornly.

"I'm sure I will," he replied, matching her gaze.

"Gilmore!" They cut off their minor staring contest to turn towards Ed. "You reading on the job?"

"No, I- I was just-" Rory started, while Jess smirked at her flustered state.

"Because you still have a good three hours of community service left to do."

"No, sir, I was just...my book fell out of my pocket while I was working, so I just, err...sat down...to pick it up," she stuttered.

"That better be the case," Ed replied, shortly. As he turned to leave, he noticed Jess holding a garbage picker, "Good work, Mariano, glad to see you're developing a work ethic at last."

Barely able to contain in his mirth, Jess replied, "Thanks, sir," as Ed started to walk away.

Rory glared up at the smirking face above her, though allowing him to pull her up to a standing position, nonetheless. She tried to maintain her steely expression despite the fact that their hands had remained in contact just a fraction too long after he'd pulled her up, before commanding, "Don't say a word."

"You're right, you can totally stand up to authority," he remarked, unable to resist.

"Those sounded like words to me."

He held his hands up in mock defeat, despite the fact that he continued to smirk in that infuriating way of his. Rory stalked off to get herself a garbage picker, before remembering something and turning back to snatch Don back off of Jess. "Cruel woman," Jess said in response, shaking his head.

"He likes me better, anyways," she replied, before walking off to get to work. Still smirking, Jess followed her. Three hours left of this. Why did that suddenly sound like such a bad thing?

* * *

"I can't believe we're finally free!" Rory cried with more enthusiasm than she actually felt, as she hung up her community service jacket for the last time.

"Yeah, but do you know what that means? You're gonna have to say goodbye to Don."

Rory's eyes widened. "Oh my God, I hadn't thought of that!"

"Would you two like a moment alone?"

"I think I'm gonna be okay, it's just so sudden, you know?"

"Don't worry about it, everyone grieves at their own pace," Jess replied, trying to prolong the joking in order to avoid the actual 'goodbye' part for as long as possible. "Y'know what? You should steal him."

"What?" Jess had to suppress a chuckle at the outraged expression as she tried to wrap her mind around the concept of stealing. "I can't _steal_ him!"

"You stole a yacht didn't you? This is a _much_ smaller felony. Besides, we're already signed out, Ed's busy supervising the others, you can literally just walk out with it."

"But it's still a felony! I could get community service for stealing from community service!"

"Hey, if you think you're too much of a suck-up to be able to, I completely understand."

Rory held his challenging gaze, narrowing her eyes slightly, "You really don't think I could do it?"

"I _know_ you can't do it."

She held his gaze for a moment longer before making a decision. "Fine," she said, coolly, making her way out of the building.

"Right behind you," Jess replied, and Rory didn't have to turn around to know that that smirk was still firmly in place.

Once safely outside, she turned to him, slightly incredulous, "I just committed a felony. Again!"

"I have never been more proud of you."

"I should return this."

"So that I have to watch you mope around after Don for the rest of your life? I don't think so."

"Well, technically, you'd only have to watch me mope around for the next fifteen minutes or so seeing as you're leaving for New York in the morning," Rory said, finally vocalising what had been in the back of their minds for the past few days.

"Right." It was strange how one reminder could kill the witty front that they'd perfected within two seconds flat. Rory gazed at her feet, wondering why this was so hard for her. During the separation from her mother, she'd had a kind of mask of misguided anger and self-righteousness to help keep her mind off of the pain of their separation, but there was nothing to hide behind this time. New York would always be his home, and Stars Hollow hers.

Snapping out of her reverie, before it completely overtook her mind, she searched for something to say to fill in the very abrupt silence. "So, are you all packed?" _That's great, Gilmore, the most generic moving-related question of all time._

"Yup, pretty much. You might have noticed that I don't exactly have mountains of possessions to take with me," he replied, reminding Rory of the small pile of things next to the mattress of his apartment, and causing her to feel a small pang of worry at the thought of what kind of home he'd be returning to in New York.

"Right, of course." God, when did it become so impossible to think of something reasonably intelligent to say? Glancing down at her hands, awkwardly, she regretfully noticed the time. "I should, uh, probably get going: my mom's expecting me back in approximately minus twenty minutes. You, uh- you have my number, right? If you feel like deriding my taste in literature sometime?"

"Well, if you insist on constantly bashing Hemingway..." he trailed off, in a last ditch attempt to keep things light and humorous. "Yeah, I've got it."

"So, I guess this is...goodbye, then. Ugh, did that sound as lame as I thought it did?" Rory added, laughing nervously.

The corner of his mouth twitched up half-heartedly at her feeble attempt to lighten the mood. He took a deep breath, "Goodbye, Rory."

"Bye, Jess," she said, giving him a final attempt at a smile, before turning around to walk to her car. She took a few steps, held back by how underwhelming that had been, despite everything that had happened over the past few months. She stopped in her tracks, hesitating for a moment before turning back around with a new resolve. He was still standing where he'd just been, and she retraced her steps quickly before reaching him again and wrapping her arms around him before her mind could catch up with her.

Surprised, he stood frozen for a moment, before his arms moved, apparently of their own accord, to wrap themselves around her back, holding her in place as her head settled against his shoulder. They stood silently embracing for a moment, before she murmured, "I'm really gonna miss you." She blushed, regretting her own girliness as soon as she'd said it.

"Me too," he muttered into her hair, slightly tightening his arms around her. They stood there for a longer period of time than any friendly hug could possibly allow, before she pulled away again. She met his gaze for a moment longer, before repeating a slightly pathetic-sounding "bye," and turning to jog the distance back to her car, blushing in embarrassment. God, she wished she could stop thinking and behaving like she was freaking sixteen again. Once out of sight of him, she shut herself into her car and sighed deeply. She put her head in her hands, propping her elbows up on the steering wheel and pressing her hands to her eyes to try to stop the annoying tears that were threatening to spill. Once she'd gotten a hold of herself again, she started to drive, not allowing herself to think about what had just happened.

* * *

She managed to get herself to her destination without her resolve crumbling but, standing outside the door of her house she finally allowed her tears to fall, her body shaking slightly with the effort of having had to contain them. Steadying herself, she knocked twice, still not used to being able to walk in their freely.

"Rory, is that you?" Lorelai's voice sounded from inside as she walked to the door. "Because if it is, you will _not_ believe what happened at work today, unless you're not Rory and you're the guy delivering the pizza I just ordered, in which case I commend you on your speediness, but-" She broke off immediately as she finally opened the door and took in her daughter's tearful expression. "Honey, what's wrong?" she asked, concern clouding her expression straight away.

"I think I'm ready to wallow now," Rory replied, weakly.

Wordlessly, Lorelai wrapped arms around her daughter, and they stood there for a moment, the silence only broken by the quiet sound of Rory crying. After a spell, Lorelai said, "I'm guessing you'll explain what a garbage picker is doing in your car sometime later?"

Rory nodded, letting out a small, tearful laugh, before allowing herself to be guided into the house by her mother.

* * *

**A/N: Thanks for reading! Again: so sorry for the long wait, and for the fact that this is so short – I hadn't got a lot planned for this chapter. And, if you hadn't noticed, I'm really not good at the big emotional scenes, so I hope I did okay-ish. Should be another update over the next few weeks, but reviews definitely help speed the process along. (Hint, hint.)**


	12. New York, New York

**Summary: Jess never went to Stars Hollow, continuing down a bad path living in New York, eventually getting punished with community service, where he happens to bump into a certain Gilmore fresh from her yacht-stealing escapades. Lit. Set around 6x03 and onwards.**

**A/N: It seems I do nothing but apologise in these things, but once again: I'm so sorry it's been so long, as I'm **_**really**_** not very good at writing these kinds of chapters (you'll see) so I suffered a bit of writer's block for a while. Also writing Paris scares me. But yeah, thanks for sticking with the story this far and I hope you like the chapter!**

**Disclaimer: I own nothing**

* * *

A few weeks had gone by since Rory's tearful arrival on her mother's doorstep and, in a very Rory-like fashion, she'd managed to rationalise the events of the day to fit the version of the truth that she found easiest to believe. Her overreaction to Jess leaving, she'd explained to herself (and to a silently sceptical Lorelai the morning after her evening of wallowing), was clearly just a delayed response to her break-up with Logan triggered by losing the friend that had served to take her mind off of it and, after an evening of sobbing over Ben and Jerry's while Lorelai worked her comforting motherly magic, she should have been more than ready to leave behind her so-called delayed break up blues. But the only flaw with this was that she hadn't quite managed to shrug off her sadness. Over the next few weeks, even at her happiest moments, she still felt a slight sense of gloom. But that, she told herself, was also perfectly normal: it was natural for her to miss someone that she'd been used to seeing every day, to feel a slight pang whenever she looked at her book collection (which, being Rory, she did a _lot_), or to imagine what that person would say at any given time. Altogether, she was faring okay, keeping herself busy with chasing up Yale professors to beg to be let back into classes and moving herself into Paris and Doyle's apartment. Her roommates also served as fairly good distractions what with their sporadic self defence practises and occasional arguments over the origins of obscure words.

As it happened, Rory was lying on the sofa snatching a few minutes of precious naptime before her next class when in burst one of the aforementioned roommates. Paris rushed in, slammed the front door behind her and quickly set about fastening the hundred or so locks behind her. Rory sat up, alarmed to hear what sounded like several angry pursuers outside the door.

Rory sighed, turning to her old friend, "Should I ask?"

Paris quickly turned to shush her, before looking back at the door as she waited for her assailants to leave. Eventually, the vague angry noises outside died down and Rory heard some retreating footsteps. She raised her eyebrows at Paris, awaiting an explanation. Eventually, she got one, "Okay, so I _might_ have slightly insulted one of the members of the Doo-Wop group from downstairs."

"How slight are we talking here?" Rory asked, not expecting a particularly favourable reply.

"I might have likened the intellect of one of them to that of Mrs Bennet."

"Oh, Paris," Rory sighed.

"And then went back and explained the reference to them."

"Oh, _Paris_."

"What? Can you really blame me? Have you _heard_ their conversations? They make Beavis and Butthead look like Fry and Laurie. And the fact that they couldn't pick up on a Jane Austen reference only proves my point," Paris continued, taking a seat next to her tired friend.

"You really think it's unreasonable that a member or a New Haven Doo-Wop group has yet to get through Austen's bibliography?"

"Hey, if we were talking about _Persuasion_? Sure. _Sense and Sensibility_? At a push. But no, ignorance of _Pride and Prejudice_ in this day and age is unacceptable."

"And so you had no choice but to anger the group of people that are permanently seated outside our apartment building?"

"I think Elisabeth Bennet would have done the same," Paris asserted, stubbornly.

"Luckily, I don't think she faced such obstacles," Rory said, getting up to make herself a coffee in the kitchen area.

"Hey, you wouldn't have to worry about the guys downstairs if you'd just come to the self defence classes with me and Doyle."

"As a rule I tend to avoid any situations where it'd be socially acceptable for you to put me in a headlock," Rory replied, pouring her freshly made coffee into a mug. The phone rang before Paris could make her retort, and Rory called through, "Hey, can you get that? Phone's on the coffee table."

"Fine, but I won't be held responsible for any insult I may cause to any of your acquaintances of yours if it's for you."

"Duly noted."

"Hello?" Rory heard Paris greet whoever it was, briskly. There was a pause, before she heard Paris' voice coming from the living room again, "Who's asking? You're not from the group downstairs are you?" Rory rolled her eyes, coming back into the living room, ready to save whoever the poor caller was. "Why do you want to talk to her?" Paris continued, suspiciously.

"It's for me?" Rory asked, holding out her hand for the phone.

Paris ignored her, "Well, I know she has only a select few acquaintances, and you sound neither female, nor like her grandfather or ex-boyfriend, so I repeat: who is this?"

Rory rolled her eyes again, making a grab for the phone. She managed to grab onto it, but Paris held on as well, warning her, "I don't recognise the voice; I think the Doo-Wop group are trying to get to me through you."

"Sure, or there's also the small possibility that I have friends _outside_ of you, Lane and Doyle."

Paris thought this over, before saying, "I find this harder to believe."

Rory sighed, "Just give me the phone." Paris relented, and Rory snatched it out of her grasp, walking into her bedroom with it and taking a seat on her bed. "Hello?"

"I think that might have been the scariest experience of my life," came a familiar voice on the other side of the line. Rory was so taken aback by the sound of his voice and the resulting influx of conflicting emotions that she failed to respond for a minute, causing Jess to prompt, "Hello?"

"Uh, hello," Rory said, jolting back into responsiveness.

"You said that already," Jess pointed out, sounding slightly amused.

"Yeah, I did, sorry," she stuttered out, awkwardly. The surprise of the call had left her feeling completely idiotic and at a loss for anything to say; in all the times she'd imagined hearing from Jess again over the past few weeks, she hadn't pictured it starting off with him being semi-interrogated by Paris. She also hadn't foreseen the current awkward pause.

"So, what have you been doing?" Jess asked, after a beat.

"Uh, not much. School. Books. Learning. That kind of thing," Rory replied, silently cursing her lack of eloquence.

"Right," Jess said, followed by another pause. "So, you're back at Yale, then?"

"Yup," she replied, wondering at what point in the conversation she lost around ninety per cent of her vocabulary. "And you? What have you been doing?" _That's better_, she thought to herself, _maybe next time you can even manage to spring for a word of more than one or two syllables_.

"Nothing much, just hanging out. In the park mostly."

"Central Park?"

"Washington Square Park," he corrected.

"Right."

"Well," Jess said after another gap in the conversation, "I should probably go. It's long distance."

"Yeah, it is long distance," Rory echoed, her heart sinking as she grappled for something, anything, she could say to prolong the conversation; no matter how awkward it was, this was the first time she'd spoken to him in weeks and just the sound of his voice making her stomach do all sorts of excited flips that she wasn't sure it should be doing now that that she was a twenty-one year old woman as opposed to a seventeen year old girl.

"So...see you," Jess said, and Rory thought she could detect a hint of her reluctance in his tone.

"Yeah, see you," she replied, helplessly, and felt her heart sink at the sound of the dialling tone as he hung up. Letting out a frustrated sigh, she fell back onto her bed, cursing her own idiocy. A lot of the feelings she'd been carefully compartmentalising over the last few weeks came crashing out in a wave of dissatisfaction as she lay on the bed, glaring at the phone as if it were the cause of her annoyance. As well as this, she felt a weird restlessness take root somewhere in the region of her stomach and felt the sudden urge to run away until her under-exercised body gave out on her. Suppressing this, she resolved to throw the phone to the end of the bed and remained lying on her bed until Paris came to quiz her about whether the person on the phone had been one of the Doo-Wop criminal masterminds.

* * *

The next morning, Rory found herself walking to class with Paris, the restless feeling within her growing by the minute as she listened to the blonde complain about her boyfriend's new exercise regime. "I mean it just hit me the other night," Paris continued, "that I'm dating someone who _jogs_. I'm in a serious relationship with someone who chooses to put on ridiculously tiny shorts and run around New Haven in the early hours of the morning. Well, I say run but it's really more of a bizarre power walk. But sometimes in the morning I just look out the window and there he is, making his way down the sidewalk gasping for air and wonder: is this really the possible future father of the children that I don't know whether I ever want to have?" She broke off abruptly, as they reached campus, stating "my class is this way," before continuing on, expecting Rory to follow her.

Rory, however, had stopped in her tracks. She allowed Paris to carry on walking without her, briefly weighing up her options as the restless feeling built up to a crescendo, causing her to make a snap decision and turn right back around, heading towards her car. It was a ten minute walk, and she jogged the last part of it out of impatience, finally reaching the silver vehicle slightly out of breath. (_You really do need to exercise more_, a voice in her head declared. _Ha, like that's ever gonna happen_, another retorted, and this one sounded suspiciously like Lorelai.)

She fumbled with her keys, hastily unlocking it and climbing in before she could regret her decision. For a second, the good side of Rory fought back, reasoning as to whether cutting her classes for the day was really the most responsible course of action. But, alas, Rory's good side could barely put up a defence against the mood that had possessed her every since the phone call yesterday and before she knew it the keys were turned in the ignition and she was driving. Next stop: New York.

* * *

A few hours later, having had to ask no less than six different people for directions, Rory found herself in Washington Square Park, looking at the back of a very familiar head as Jess continued to read on a bench, oblivious to her presence. Approaching as stealthily as possible, she took a seat next to him and said, "Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find a parking space in this city?"

Looking up from his book (_To Kill A Mockingbird_, she noticed) she caught a quick look of surprise in his expression before it was overtaken by a rare grin. "The fact that you'd come to New York by car at all shows your lack of experience."

Grinning back, she replied, "Hey, I've had plenty of experience with the Big Apple."

Jess groaned, "Obviously not, if you're referring to it as 'the Big Apple'."

"Hey, if you're gonna mock me, I can just go back home," she said, feigning a look of indifference.

Ignoring the threat, he asked, "You hungry?"

"Starved," she replied, smiling.

"I know a place," he said, getting up. Rory followed suit, following him out of the park.

"So, yesterday you got your first taste of life with my roommate," Rory mentioned, feeling slightly giddy at being able to see her friend again.

"The girl who Guantanamo-ed me on the phone?"

"The very same."

"I hope you put a lock on your bedroom door."

"Two. And an alarm system," Rory replied, relieved to find none of the awkwardness from the phone call as they continued down the crowded street.

"I've taught you well."

"Well, seeing as I should currently be in my German Poetry class, I guess some of your reckless ways _did_ rub off on me over time."

"Wow, Rory Gilmore cutting class to see me? I feel honored."

"Well, there's a girl who sits behind me who constantly kicks the leg of my chair, so this seemed like the more appealing option."

"Understandable," Jess replied, before coming to a halt by a hot dog stand. "Well, here's our lunch place."

"A hot dog stand?"

"Hey, I eat her every day, it's nothing fancy, but-"

"No, I love it, it's perfect," she reassured him.

"Good," he replied, turning to the vendor. "One with everything on it."

"Make that two, please," Rory added, reaching for her wallet.

"I got it," Jess said, pulling some cash out of his pocket.

"You sure?" Rory asked, as he passed her her hot dog.

"Consider it compensation for the trauma you underwent trying to park here."

Rory took a bite of her meal, "Oh my God, this is delicious; consider my trauma forgotten." She ate another mouthful, before checking her watch, "Okay, I have approximately five hours before I have to go if I want to be back at Yale before too late, what's the best New York can offer in that time range?"

"I'm guessing we're talking outside of illegal drug use, here."

"Keeping it PG-13 would be preferable, yes."

"There's a record store you should check out. It's run by this insane freak who's like a walking encyclopaedia for every punk and garage-band record ever made, it's crazy. The place is right out of _High Fidelity_."

Rory grinned, excited, "Let's go."

* * *

Two hours out of her five now gone, Rory came out of the record store followed by Jess, both carrying a few new additions to their respective music collections. "Okay, you're right, that definitely topped RBI."

"Told you," he retorted, as he steered them left down the street.

"But I have yet to see a bookstore that comes close to the one in Hartford."

"Well, good things come to those who wait," Jess replied ambiguously, smirking slightly. He grinned at the way Rory's face lit up at the possibility of a bookstore visit.

"Is that where we're going?" she asked, excitement flooding her voice.

"Way to take the mystery out of the thing."

"Ooh, are we nearly there?" she pressed, looking around eagerly.

"I never even said that we're going anywhere, maybe I'm luring you into a dark alley where some of my hoodlum friends'll mug you."

"Well the bookstore would definitely be preferable to that, but I hear getting mugged is one of the definitive New York experiences, so it wouldn't be a total disappointment," Rory retorted. They carried on in companionable silence for a couple more minutes before Rory couldn't help herself, "Are we nearly there _now_?"

"What are you, five years old?"

"If I say yes, will we get there faster?"

"A couple more blocks," he reassured at length.

Grinning, she sped up her pace. Turning back to see that he was still loitering, she grabbed him by the sleeve and dragged him so as to make him keep up with her. "Hey, watch the shirt!"

"Not until we get to the books, mister," she said, firmly.

"God, and I thought your caffeine addiction was bad."

Finally, Rory spotted a window filled with some of her favourite things in the world – old books. She upped her pace, still dragging a grumbling Jess behind her as she entered the store. There was a middle-aged woman at the counter who looked up as they entered and, to Rory's great surprise, smiled warmly at Jess in greeting.

"Hey Greta," Jess said, shooting her a quick lopsided grin before advancing further into the store with Rory, who'd finally dropped his sleeve (a fact he found kind of disappointing, if he was honest with himself). He noticed Rory's curious look, and explained, "I've been coming here most days since I was twelve; after a while, Greta started to recommend things, and occasionally if I didn't have enough money she'd just give me books, which to me qualifies her for Sainthood."

Rory nodded, as always not wanting to interrupt Jess during one of the rare occasions that he spoke about his past. Realising that he wasn't gonna start up again anytime soon, she found her eyes inevitably drawn to the books lining every wall, her face splitting into an excited grin as she took in all the shelves, fit to bursting.

Jess watched her expression with a smirk, "I take it you like it here, then?"

Turning back to face him, her eyes bright with glee, she replied, "I love it," before starting to look around. Jess watched as she ran her index finger delicately over spine after spine before settling on a book to pull out and investigate for a while, enjoying getting to see someone else who loved this place as much as he did, before going to look around, himself.

A couple of hours of browsing later and Rory was well past her self-declared curfew. But, as she added another few books to her ever-growing pile, she was about as far from caring about how late she'd get back as humanly possible. She was just pondering whether she needed another copy of _Cold Comfort Farm_ (this one was _leather bound_) when she felt a hand on her shoulder and she jumped a little, surprised. Turning around, she saw Jess, a smaller pile of his own in tow.

"We gotta go, Greta's gonna close up in a minute."

Grabbing the small mountain of books, they made their way to the counter, paid for their purchases and left the store. Rory struggled under the weight of three heavy bags and Jess, noticing this, grabbed two of them. "Thanks," Rory said, smiling gratefully.

"Well, I'm nothing if not a good pack mule."

"If only you'd employed that same work ethic to community service."

"Well, maybe if you'd let me keep Don..."

Rory scoffed at this, before observing as she looked at his one bag of purchases, "I don't see how you didn't buy more – that place is amazing."

"Well, I've lived around the block from it for over twenty years; I think it's safe to say I've very nearly combed it dry."

Rory turned to look at him, "You mean you live like two minutes away?"

"Yup."

"Can I see your place?" Rory asked, curious, before she could stop herself. Blushing, as she realised the possible implications of that request, she added, somewhat hesitantly, "I mean, if that's okay. I'm just curious to see your book collection in all its completed glory, is all."

Jess hesitated. He was slightly reluctant to show Rory yet _another_ shitty apartment he was staying in, especially after seeing where she'd been living. Bearing this in mind, he said, "I thought you had to get back before it got too late."

Disappointed, Rory let her gaze fall to the ground, "Uh, yeah, maybe I should get back. Look, I'm sorry I suggested it, I just-"

Feeling guilty, Jess backtracked, "No, it's fine, I just didn't know whether you needed to be back early, or-"

"Well, it is a Friday, I can probably afford to stay a little longer than planned," Rory said, still staring at her shoes.

"Okay, then let's go. Liz's away with some new guy at the moment so you should be able to enter relatively unscathed."

"Are you sure?" Rory asked, doubtfully.

"C'mon," Jess said, steering them round a corner towards his apartment building. It seemed a pretty standard building, as buildings go, and definitely in better shape than his place in Connecticut was, but nonetheless the apartment was still miniscule, a fact made all the more clear when he thought back to Rory's Birthday party at her grandparents' mansion. He pulled out his key as they reached the door and let them both into the apartment building. Rory followed him up the stairs in a slightly uncomfortable silence and, at length, they reached his floor and he led her to his apartment and opened the door.

Thinking back to the last apartment of his that she'd seen, Rory was quite relieved to find a relatively normal place. Sure, it was pretty small, but there were no mattresses on the floor, which was a big step up from the last one. Jess led her through the main room, which served as both a living room and a kitchen and to an even smaller room, which Rory guessed was his. Jess opened the door for her and she followed him in. It was a fairly plain looking room mainly taken up by Jess' bed, but that wasn't the feature that Rory's eyes were drawn to as soon as she entered. On every available surface (apart from the bed itself) there were stacks of books. She was amazed to find that his collection was probably even bigger than her own and, with glee, started looking through the titles.

"Organised chaos; I like it," she said, with a smile as she looked.

Jess sat down on the bed and watched as she darted between stacks of books for the second time that day. "Be careful: if you disturb my filing system I'll be forced to sever all ties with you."

"I'll take my chances," Rory replied with a grin.

After a long period of exploration, Rory found herself sitting cross-legged opposite Jess on his bed, surrounded by little stacks of books. When it became clear to her that she couldn't possible leave without borrowing a decent portion of his collection and it consequently became clear to him that this would mean not being able to get them back for a sizeable length of time owing to the distance between New Haven and New York, serious book-trading negotiations began. Rory had decided that the most organised way to deal with the problem would be to create a list ("Your solution to everything," Jess scoffed) of all the books she'd be willing to lend him from _her _collection when they next saw each other again, and so now was the time to negotiate which books he was willing to lend in exchange.

"How about your _Great Expectations_ for my _Rebecca_?" Rory propositioned.

"You can't seriously be telling me you don't have your own copy of _Great Expectations_."

"Naturally, but this one comes complete with your margin notes."

"I never knew you had such a high opinion of my notes," he smirked.

"Quit stalling: deal or no deal?"

Jess contemplated the deal for a moment, "No deal."

"What? _Rebecca_ is a classic."

"Yes, but not one worthy of _Great Expectations_."

"Fine, how about _Rebecca_ and _Jamaica Inn_?"

"Someone's desperate to get rid of their Daphne Du Mauriers."

"Deal?" Rory asked, impatiently.

"Fine," Jess relented, handing over _Great Expectations_.

"Okay," Rory said, and Jess was slightly amused at how businesslike she looked as she glanced down her list thoroughly. "I think that should be just about it, nice doing business with-" She broke off as the book on the bedside table caught her eye. "The complete works of Oscar Wilde?" she asked, her eyes lingering on the spine, hungrily.

"No way," Jess replied, firmly.

"'Not even for ready money?'" Rory quoted at him with an innocent look.

"You are not going to pout me out of my reading material."

"_Please_."

"Nope."

"But I've only ever read _Importance of Being Earnest_ and I've been meaning to read _Dorian Grey _since forever!"

"Still no."

"I'll be your best friend?"

"Oh great, you're five again."

Rory sighed. "Fine," she said, casting a longing look at the book. She made to start tidying away the books he'd lent her and, while he turned to start collecting up the books that had been scattered around the bed, she quickly reached over and grabbed Oscar up off of the table with a triumphant, "Ha!"

Jess raised his eyebrows, "Didn't community service teach you anything about the importance of respecting other people's property."

"Yeah, but then _you_ taught me the importance of not caring about what other people think."

"Touché," he replied. "Unfortunately I still can't let you have the book."

"What d'you plan on doing about it, Dodger?"

"You're seriously gonna make me wrestle it off you? You're that stubborn?"

"When it comes to Oscar Wilde, yes."

"Fine, take the stupid book," Jess gave in.

Rory grinned triumphantly and added it to her pile. The moment her hands left the book, Jess went to grab onto it, but Rory saw and went for it at the same time. Both grabbing onto the book, they looked at each other for minute, before Rory gave a wild tug, falling back onto the bed, taking the book with her. But Jess, still hanging on, ended up being pulled along with it, falling on top of her in his effort to hold onto it. For a minute, they fought for possession of the thing (in possibly the only Oscar Wilde-related wrestling match of all time), laughing, before they actually realised the position they were in.

Rory still wasn't entirely sure _how _it happened, but all of a sudden the precious book had fallen to the floor and Jess' lips were on hers. On instinct, her hands gripped the back of his collar, pulling him closer as the kiss deepened. All rational thought left her as she ran one hand through his hair, the other over his back, feeling his tensed back muscles through his thin shirt. One of his hands moved up to cup her cheek, and the other ran down her side, sending little electric tingles as it went.

And despite all the stupid rationalisations she'd made over the past few weeks, all she could think was _finally_. And then for a minute she was rendered incapable of thought as he started kissing his way towards her neck, eliciting a quiet moan from her which just served to make him double his efforts. _I'm making out with Jess Mariano,_ Rory thought to herself, _I'm making out with Jess Mariano amid a pile of books. I think I've literally had dreams to this effect._ And then he bit down on _that_ spot on her neck and all conscious thought left her altogether. She grabbed for his shirt collar again, this time reaching for the front, hastily unbuttoning it and throwing the offending garment to the floor for daring to come between them. Her own top was soon to follow and it wasn't long before more clothes joined them on the floor, swept off along with all the piles of books that Rory had so carefully stacked up earlier. Looking back on the experience, Rory was pretty sure that those were the only circumstances under which she'd treat any book with such careless abandon.

All the same, it was _so worth it_.

* * *

**A/N: Sorry again for the long wait, people! Hope you enjoyed, and it didn't seem too OOC to you guys. Please, please, please review – it may not seem like it, given past evidence, but it really does make me write faster. Oh, and also, apologies for borrowing a few lines of dialogue from the show - I wanted to do a parallel to the New York episode, so it seemed right to use a couple of lines of the original dialogue.**

**Jay-La**


	13. The Morning After

**Summary: Jess never went to Stars Hollow, continuing down a bad path living in New York, eventually getting punished with community service, where he happens to bump into a certain Gilmore fresh from her yacht-stealing escapades. Lit. Set around 6x03 and onwards.**

**A/N: Here goes again: I'm so sorry that it's been such a ridiculously long time, I've just had a lot else going on in my life and I've been out of the GG frame of mind what with falling in love with **_**Community**_** and every TV show Joss Whedon has ever made... But here I am! With a much belated chapter! Hope you enjoy it!**

**Disclaimer: I own nothing. Grr. Argh.**

* * *

There were a few moments of calm.

Rory woke up gradually, a deep-rooted feeling of contentedness spreading over her whole body. Too sleepy to process actual thought as of yet, she briefly experienced the world through feeling alone: a smooth, muscular chest beneath her cheek, an arm looped snugly around her waist and a comfortingly familiar scent surrounding her. A smile tugged at her lips as she snuggled instinctively against the sleeping figure next to her.

Then the thoughts started rolling in.

And the thing about Rory Gilmore is that the ability to think calmly, clearly and without bias is one that only really shows itself post-morning caffeine boost. And so, rather than being able to entertain any ideas of allowing herself to be happy in a moment that – she had to admit to herself – she'd been fantasising about for a _long_ time, Rory's head was instantly bombarded by nothing but cold, hard facts. _New York. New Haven. 80.9 miles (because yes, it's possible that she may have Yahoo'd it). Could never work. Never._ And, in our poor Gilmore's disorientated state, this train of thought lead to what could be best described as a freak out.

"Oh, my God," Rory said, jolting upright with a start.

The movement woke up Jess who murmured a sleepy, "Hey," with a half-smile, having yet to fully take in Rory's distress.

"Oh, my God," Rory repeated, remaining frozen for a moment before suddenly springing into action, reaching for her clothes.

"What, do you have class, or-?" Jess began, stretching and sitting up, still not quite grasping what was happening.

"No- well, yes actually," Rory corrected herself, pulling on her pants, "but, I mean, that's easy enough to catch up on."

"Then what's with the sudden transformation into the human blur?" Jess asked, pulling on a shirt.

"This- this shouldn't have happened," Rory stammered out, now fully dressed but for one shoe.

"What?" He froze in the middle of pulling on his pants, turning to look at her incredulously.

She stood up from her position on the floor, where she'd be scrambling to find her missing shoe, and turned to face him. "It was a mistake, okay? These things happen sometimes between friends- close friends, and it doesn't have to mean anything, because it's nothing, and- and a mistake, and-"

"Do I get to be included in this little rationalisation any time soon?" Jess asked, anger now starting to brew in his tone.

_Screw it, I don't need a second shoe_, she thought to herself, grabbing her bag and heading for the door. "Look, I have to go," she said, turning to leave.

"Rory!" Jess exclaimed, exasperated, darting across the room to grab her wrist before she could disappear, "What the hell is going on here?"

"I told you, it was a mistake," she repeated, quietly, refusing to meet his eyes.

"Oh, yeah, that sounded real convincing."

"What more do you want from me? I'm sorry if you felt something that I-"

"Oh don't give me that crap, Ror, there's something between us and you know it – hell, _I_ know it! I've known it since you first started yammering on about that stupid garbage picker, and I have no idea why you're acting this way, but don't try to pretend that you don't feel something for me, too."

Blinking back tears, her eyes briefly rose to meet his, shocked by his uncharacteristically less-than-stoical outburst, "Jess, I-"

"Don't make whatever excuses you've convinced yourself you need to make," he said, the anger fading from his eyes as his gaze took on an imploring shade that she'd never seen before. "Look, Rory, I-"

"Jess, please, just stop-"

"I love-"

"I have to go," she blurted out, quickly freeing her wrist from where it still lingered in his grasp and darting out the door, leaving a stunned Jess in her wake.

* * *

Her gaze fixed upon the road, Rory drove onwards in a state of numbness. Mindlessly, she jabbed at the radio until she finally settled on a channel playing old classics. Her face betrayed no emotion as the scenery whizzed past in her periphery. She fixed her mind on the lyrics of whatever was playing (an old XTC number) lest any thoughts of what had just happened permeated her quiet stupor.

She managed to continue on in this way until she was almost at New Haven, at which point a voice from the radio announced, "_And now, by request, that old hit from The Monkees: Last Train to Clarkesville..._" As the opening bars started to play, Rory was pummelled by reality for a moment before quickly shutting off the radio, her breaths suddenly getting shallower as she found herself desperately trying not to choke up.

Blinking back tears, she pulled over and leaned her head against the steering wheel as the tears she could no longer hold back came rolling down her cheeks in rivulets. God, she hated this! She hated that they were fighting _again_, she hated the look on his face when she'd left, and above all she hated that she'd been the cause of all of this. But – she was right, wasn't she? There was no way that a long distance relationship could ever work for a sustained period of time, so what was the point of risking losing the person that had become her best friend over it? And, for that matter, who's to say that she even wants anything more than friendship? Sure, she'd been feeling a lot of very strong, confusing things over the past few weeks (months), but how much of that could be attributed to her recent messy break-up? _No_, she thought to herself with new resolve, _I did the right thing_. _So why do I feel this way?_

Brushing the tears out of her face, she started the car again and swerved off her original course, instead heading straight for Stars Hollow.

* * *

Lorelai adjusted her position on the couch for the umpteenth time. Trust the universe to conspire against her on her one day off from The Dragonfly – first an irate phone call from her mother at an ungodly hour, then Paul Anka decided to be particularly neurotic in his morning routine, somehow managing to stretch it out to an hour, then – _then_ – Taylor decided to drop by and yammer away for at least a millennium about some ancient town rule of conduct just come to light that somehow affects the size of The Dragonfly's stables and now that she was finally able to sprawl out on her couch, it appeared to have been transformed into some malevolent creature impossible of providing comfort. "Okay, couch," she mumbled to the offending object, shifting herself yet again so that she was now lying with her head propped up on the arm while her legs rested on the top rim of the couch, "work with me here, because I have defended you too many times to my mother to have to throw you out now..." She shuffled again slightly, finally finding the perfect position, "Ah! Comfortable paradise! Well, I don't think I'm gonna be moving for the next four hours or so," she said to herself, grabbing the remote contentedly.

There was a knock at the door.

"Oh, for the love of God," Lorelai groaned, hesitating for a moment before another knock forced her to get up and make her way to the door. "Taylor, if this is you again, I swear to-" she cut herself off in surprise as she opened the door to see her daughter standing before her. "Rory? What are you doing here? I thought-"

"I slept with Jess," Rory blurted out abruptly.

Lorelai blinked. "You-"

"I slept with Jess," Rory repeated, dazed, "and then I...I came here."

"Rory, honey, I need you to back up a little here," Lorelai replied, guiding them into the house and closing the door behind them. "Okay, so what happened?" she asked once they were both sat down on the couch.

"I slept with Jess!" Rory repeated again, exasperated.

"Believe it or not, I got that part- and, by the way, any time you wanna stop repeating that sentence would be just great, because although as a Mom I may err on the side of coolness, there are certain images I definitely don't need repeatedly shoved down my throat."

Rory deflated, loosening up slightly, "Sorry."

"Don't worry about it. Now, do you wanna start from the beginning? Because, to the best of my memory – which, granted, tends to hinge upon my caffeine consumption of a day – Jess is currently in New York and you're, well, not."

"I was – I went to see him. Yesterday."

Lorelai frowned slightly, "Didn't you have class yesterday?"

"Yes, but then he called me, and – I don't know, it did something to me! And then, all of the sudden I'm in my car trying to find a parking spot in New York, which, by the way, was more difficult than the sum of my Yale experience thus far, I mean, you'd think that it'd be possible to construct at least _one_ parking lot with a reasonable charge, but _no_-"

"Rory, something tells me you didn't drive here to give me a lecture of the perils of parking in Manhattan."

"Right," Rory agreed, trying to collect her thoughts. "Well, there's not much to tell – he called me, I visited him, I slept with him."

"And is there any reason you're currently sitting here with me instead of going for Round Two?"

"Mom!" Rory cried, and then, after a moment's pause, added, "Besides, it'd technically be Round Four, anyway..."

"Okay, we are swiftly crossing the border of too much information!" Lorelai exclaimed, bringing her hands up to cover her ears.

"You started it," Rory pouted.

"And as soon as you're gone I'll start making with the Hail Marys, believe me," Lorelai shuddered. "Swiftly ignoring that little detour into awkwardness, you didn't answer my question, how come you ran away?"

"I did not run away! I walked."

"Rory..."

"Okay, so it might have been a brisk walk, but a walk nonetheless."

"Hey, you're forgetting who taught you your verbal stalling tactics here – get to the point, missy."

Rory sighed, "I just had to leave, Mom."

"What, you were lying there and suddenly thought 'Dear Lord, there's a two for one sale of turnips at Doose's at the moment, I've gotta get on back to the Hollow'?"

Rory rolled her eyes, "No."

"Did he snore?" Lorelai asked, scrunching up her nose.

"No!" Rory replied, defiantly, before going back on herself, "Well, a little, but I actually thought it was kinda cute," she said, a reluctant smile tugging at her lips, quickly vanquished by the reminder of what had happened afterwards.

"So, what was it?" Beat. "Come on, kid, I'm really trying to do the whole motherly advice thing, but I've got very little information to go on here."

"I just woke up, and it immediately hit me how it was never going to work, you know? I mean, we live so far apart, and I don't even know how I _feel_ about Jess..."

"Well, that's easy: you're in love with him," Lorelai stated plainly, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

Rory stared blankly at her mother for a moment. "What?"

"Come on, Rory, you have to have noticed."

"There's nothing to notice!" Rory protested. "Well, nothing of that nature, anyway."

"Oh, so you slept with him because- what? You like the way he does his hair?"

"No, there was just a moment, and-"

"A moment of _looove_," Lorelai teased in a croon-y voice.

"No! Look, I only got out of a serious relationship recently, how am I supposed to have fallen in love with someone else already?"

"Well, let's lay the evidence before the court, shall we? Firstly, from the way the two of you were at your birthday party-"

"You never even saw us together there!"

"I was standing across the room from the two of you, my gaze travels. And, if you're going to interrupt again, I'm going to have to ask that you preface it with 'objection'." Rory rolled her eyes again before Lorelai continued, "Anyway, the point it, I saw you light up as soon as you started talking to him, and I'll bet that you'd been hanging out with him for a fair bit before that. Evidence number two: I seem to remember a certain distraught person showing up on my doorstep at the end of community service-"

"I told you – that was Logan-wallowing, nothing Jess-related at all!"

"Hey!"

"I'm not going to say 'objection', mother."

"Fine," Lorelai relented, "but it seems to be rather oddly-timed wallow for Logan considering it coincided with Jess leaving."

"I guess that it just triggered-"

"Evidence the third," Lorelai cut her off, "he calls you and you are immediately compelled to go try your luck at parking in Manhattan. And, wait, what was the final piece? Oh yeah, the fact that you just slept with the guy. Combined with your major overreaction to what just happened, I think we can safely say this case is closed."

"No," Rory repeated, her gaze dropping so as not to meet her mother's as she shook her head slightly, "you're wrong."

"I don't understand why you're fighting this so hard – the two of you get along great, he seems like a good guy to me, you two appear to have a huge amount in common and, despite the slight ick-factor of being cousins-in-law after Luke and I get married, you just seem perfect for each other." Lorelai paused, before adding, reluctantly, "You have _no_ idea how much it creeps me out to ask this, but was it the sex?"

"No!" Rory replied instantly, blushing slightly, "No, definitely not the sex..."

"Okay, okay, so what's the problem?"

"I can't, okay? I just can't."

"I don't get it – you just seem to be causing more pain for both of you."

"Look, I can't lose him! Okay?" Rory burst out, all defences suddenly crashing down around her. "You don't get it – aside for one horrific fight, he's been there this whole time, when I was- when you and I were...and when I was fighting Logan, or my grandparents he was _there_ for me, joking around or going to book stores or arguing incessantly about _The Monkees_... And now, I just- I don't know how to have him not be there. If anything were to happen with us- anything _more,_ that is, and then if we were to break up... I just can't, okay? He's my best friend and I need him, so I just can't be in love with him. I can't."

"Rory..." Lorelai said, an understanding and sympathy shining through her eyes that Rory couldn't take at that moment.

"No, Mom, I can't talk about this," Rory snapped. "Can we not just watch TV, or something?"

"Honey, I really think-"

"Please, Mom," Rory said with desperation in her voice.

"Okay, hon, whatever you want," Lorelai replied, finally relenting as she switched the TV back on and watched, concerned, as her daughter stared blankly at the screen.

* * *

Hours later, Lorelai was back to struggling to find the Holy Grail of couch positions. Rory had bolstered up as much artificial enthusiasm as possible and initiated a TV marathon, which she stuck to stubbornly, refusing to re-visit earlier topics of conversation, before grabbing a quick dinner and going to bed extremely early, planning to leave for Yale again the next morning, which left Lorelai back where she'd started: on the couch of perpetual discomfort. Just when she was considering some kind of satanic couch-related deal, Luke came back from work. With a grin, she sprung up from the couch (from henceforth to be referred to as 'the _darn_ couch') to give her fiancé a quick peck on the lips. "Hey," she greeted with a grin.

"Hey," he replied with a grin as he followed her into the kitchen to take a seat at the table.

"Good day?"

"There were people, I fed them."

"Wow, what a beautiful way with words you have – have you considered a career in poetry?"

"Only if it was a very Haiku-based career."

"I think we could make it work," Lorelai replied. "So, otherwise uneventful?"

"There may have been a brief Taylor-related meltdown, but can't say that's outside of the norm."

"Ah, has the new town regulation found away to bite you in the ass, too?" Lorelai asked, pouring them both drinks and setting them down on the table.

"Apparently my sign is a quarter of an inch too large."

"What a coincidence – my stables are two and a half inches too far to the left."

Luke raised his glass, "To Taylor's imminent demise?"

"I'll drink to that," Lorelai replied, clinking her glass with his. "So, my day wasn't exactly uneventful."

"You're mother's not lurking around here somewhere, is she?" Luke asked, the sudden panic in his eyes almost prompting a laugh from his fiancée.

"No, but there is another Gilmore girl around the place."

"Rory's here?" Luke asked, and Lorelai felt a little touched at how his face lit up at the prospect of seeing his soon-to-be step-daughter.

"She's in her room – there's been a little boy-related confusion of late."

"Oh man, that rich guy again?"

"Nope."

Luke looked confused, "Surely not Dean – I thought they broke up way back around her graduation?"

"Wrong again, it was The Prodigal Nephew, actually."

"Oh," Luke said, surprised, before a look of understanding dawned on his face and he repeated, "Ohhh..."

"What?" Lorelai asked, suspicious.

"Nothing."

"No, no, no, that was a loaded 'ohhh', mister."

"I may have gotten a phone call earlier..."

"From Jess?"

"Yes."

"Yes, from Jess?"

"Lorelai..."

"Sorry, I can't resist exploiting a good rhyme when I see one," Lorelai said with a guilty grin. "I'm guessing he didn't just call to talk about baseball and the lack of beer at DAR parties or whatever it is you guys talk about."

Luke raised his eyebrows, "You know, there _are_ other topics of guy conversation."

"Okay, okay, I'm sorry I'm stifling your creative powers of conversation, now tell."

"He, um, wanted Rory's address at Yale," Luke admitted, reluctantly.

"Ohhh," Lorelai said, echoing Luke's earlier words.

"Look, did he do something to hurt her? Because New York isn't that far away – I can go and put the fear of God in the little punk, if necessary."

"No," Lorelai replied, calmly, "no, I think on this occasion it was Rory who did the hurting."

"Oh," Luke said, pausing with a slight frown. "Was I wrong to give him the address? I figured they were friends, and he probably just wanted to send her a book or something..."

"No, no, it's fine, I think it'd be better if we just let this one play out," Lorelai assured him. "Now, we have some planning to do, because I figure if you expand your sign and I shift the stables just a little further to the left, Taylor may finally have that fully-fledged breakdown he's been teetering on the brink of for so long..."

* * *

"Morning," Rory said to her mother as she came into the kitchen to grab some breakfast. "Where's Luke?"

"Oh, he had to get up at some ridiculous hour for a shipment," Lorelai replied from her seat at the kitchen table.

"How you two managed to find common ground on your sleeping hours, I'll never know," Rory said, sitting down with her newly-popped Pop Tart.

"Having the best coffee-maker in the world living with me is compensation enough, believe me," Lorelai shot back, before setting down her newspaper and focussing on her daughter. "Look, about our conversation yesterday..."

"I don't want to talk about, Mom," Rory replied, staring at her food. "I can't talk about it."

"I just think that-"

"So, where are you with the wedding plans?" Rory asked in a desperate (and rather feeble) attempt at a subject change.

Lorelai sighed, taking pity on her daughter, "Well, I'd say I'm pretty much done. Aside from...you know, the dress, the location, the invitations, the food, the guest list and the date, that is..."

* * *

Rory sighed as she pulled into her parking space at Yale. Well, at least she hadn't had to pull over and cry at the side of the road this time, so it was definitely an improvement on her last car journey. Grabbing her bag, she locked up the car and headed for her building. After thankfully noting the absence of the Dew-Wop group outside of the building, she got out her keys and prepared herself for the mountain climb that was her staircase.

As she climbed the last of the stairs, her sigh of relief that the trek was over turned into a gasp as she saw an all-too-familiar someone standing in the hall. A someone who did not look particularly pleased with her.

"Hi."

* * *

**A/N: Hope you enjoyed the chapter and you're not **_**too**_** frustrated with me at the moment... Please, please, please review, it keeps me reminded to write! I promise to update more quickly than I did this time around.**

**Jay-La52**


	14. Full Circle

**Summary: Jess never went to Stars Hollow, continuing down a bad path living in New York, eventually getting punished with community service, where he happens to bump into a certain Gilmore fresh from her yacht-stealing escapades. Lit. Set around 6x03 and onwards.**

**A/N: Hello! I am here! After only three and a half months, at that! Personal record? Anyhoo, thanks for the reviews and I hope you enjoy the chapter! (Which, incidentally, will be the last one, barring an epilogue – this has been a great writing experience and thank you all so much for making it that way.)**

* * *

As she climbed the last of the stairs, her sigh of relief that the trek was over turned into a gasp as she saw an all-too-familiar someone standing in the hall. A someone who did not look particularly pleased with her.

"Hi."

_That's great, Rory_, she thought to herself, _you sleep with your best friend, run away in the overreaction of the decade – strike that, century – and now, upon seeing him again, the best you can do is a meagre 'hi'. Top notch verbage there, Gilmore. Well, then again, verbage implies a verb of some kind, which that feeble offering lacked..._

"What- what are you doing here?" She managed at last, effectively cutting off her inner diatribe.

Jess gestured to the pile of books next to him which she recognised as the ones she'd left at his apartment in her hurry to leave. His face had taken on a controlled impassivity that she'd only seen on a couple of occasions: the black eye incident after they'd first met, the time she'd confronted him at his apartment after he'd gotten badly beat up and, of course, the infamous hit-and-run she'd pulled after their last encounter. She knew this expression was the preface to a fight.

Nevertheless, she asked, "You came from New York to New Haven to return some books?"

"Well, Rory," he replied, with a sharp acerbic edge to his voice, "the returning of books is fairly standard between 'friends- close friends, and it doesn't have to _mean_ anything'."

Stung by hearing her feeble justifications of the previous morning thrown back at her with such malice, Rory averted her eyes and chose to focus on the laborious task of going through each of the locks on her door rather than the increasingly irate Jess. "I get that you're angry..." she began, moving onto the second lock.

"I guess leaving the books was one of the many '_mistakes_' you made that night, huh?" he continued, following her into her now open apartment.

"Look, I admit I didn't phrase it the best way, but-" Rory started again, having no choice but to turn back to face him now that they were inside.

"I dunno, I think you expressed yourself pretty clearly."

"But," Rory continued, as if uninterrupted, "I think it was the right thing to do."

"Bull."

"Jess!" she cried, exasperated. "Do you really think this could ever actually work? I mean- look at us! One night together and we're already messed up!"

"And whose fault is that exactly?" he bit back, matching her raised volume.

"And- and you really think we can maintain a relationship between New York and New Haven?" She asked, counting off the second reason on her hand.

"Oh, so yesterday it was 'I'm sorry if you felt something that I didn't' and now the distance is the only obstacle?"

Rory sighed, dropping her arms in defeat, "I don't know how I feel, Jess, okay? I've felt so many different things over the past few months and I just don't know."

"Bull," he repeated, barely suppressing an eye roll. "You know exactly how you feel and the only thing that's holding you back is that it scares you, is all!"

"Well thank you for that insight into my brain, Jess, real illuminating," she bit back, annoyed.

"Come on, Rory, this is what you always do – something scares you, you run and then make up justifications later, isn't that what happened with Yale and your mom?"

She recoiled, visibly shaken, "I can't believe you'd bring _that_ up now!"

"You only react like that because you know I'm right."

"Or maybe I just don't want to be with you, Jess, did that ever occur to you?" she threw back, cursing herself for the blatant lie but wanting to get back at him at some way at the same time.

"You came to New York, Rory," he stated, deflating slightly.

"I know."

"You came to New York and then slept with me; are you honestly saying that meant nothing to you?" he asked, and Rory saw a rare, almost imperceptible, flash of vulnerability play across his face.

"What do you want from me, Jess?" she asked back, after a pause.

"I want _you_, Ror!" he replied, frustrated. "I want the girl who came up to me and started arguing about a stupid garbage picker and _The Age of Innocence_, the girl who stole a freaking yacht yet has an attack of guilt if she puts the wrong time on the community service sign in sheet! I wanna argue about _The Monkees_ and go book-buying and trade CDs- fuck it, I want _more_ than that! I thought I could keep doing the friend thing, but I can't remember the last time that I felt anything remotely friendly towards you – I wanna be _with_ you Ror, and if you don't want that, that's fine, but I can't go back to being friends with you, I just can't."

Rory hesitated, shocked and moved by his uncharacteristic outburst, but something inside – the part that had been running awful break-up scenarios ever since the morning before – compelled her to give one last weak protest. "It wouldn't work out," she persisted, softly.

"For fuck sake, Ror, 80.9 miles isn't an _insurmountable_ distance!"

The tiniest of smiles twitched at her lips, "You looked it up?"

He ran a hand through his hair, regretting letting that stupid figure slip out. The fight drained out of him as he felt resignation begin to take hold. "I just hit a couple of buttons on a computer..." he protested, weakly.

"You looked it up," Rory repeated, visibly touched.

He sighed, starting to back towards the door, "Look, I'm gonna go. I'm sorry I- I'm just gonna go." He turned to face the door, reaching for the handle.

Panic suddenly seized Rory and she cried "Jess, stop!" before she even knew what she was doing.

He remained frozen there, his back still turned to her. "Yes?"

"I- I think I'm in love with you." The sentence tumbled out of her mouth almost without her realising, but she knew it was true as soon as it came out – had been true for what seemed like an eternity. Her heart thumped as she stayed rooted to the spot, staring at his still turned back.

"You think or you know?" He tested, waiting to turn around until he had confirmation – he knew if he looked at her face again now he would never leave, confirmation or not.

"I know," she replied, resolutely, her new found bravery holding firm.

He turned around, and she could see the beginnings of his typical crooked smile upon his face as he took a step forward, back towards her.

"So?" Rory asked, suddenly daring as she matched his step, "Are you gonna say it back?"

Another step forward. "Are you gonna let me get it out this time?"

Step. "I think the odds are definitely in your favour."

They could no longer move any closer. Jess looked into her eyes, mere inches from his now, seeing all the fear and anger of earlier turning back into the happy, slightly challenging look that he'd come to adore. Bowing his head slightly towards her, he breathed, "I love you, Rory."

"I love you too, Jess," she whispered just before their lips touched.

It felt like barely a graze at first, him being quite tentative for fear that her new resolve would once again vanish under uncertainty and fear. She, however, quickly put an end to all such thoughts as her hands snaked their way around his neck, pressing herself as firmly against him as she could as her lips began to move fervently against his. He returned the kiss with equal passion, wrapping his arms around her back and running his tongue across her lower lip, which elicited a moan from her that made him quiver with want. Kissing him ever more desperately, Rory started to back up clumsily as she tried to move them to her room. Her back thudded against her door as her hand fumbled with the handle; Jess dipped his head to kiss along her neck, causing her to gasp as she continued to struggle with the door. At last, the stupid thing gave in and they staggered through the room, kicking the door behind them before tumbling onto the bed.

* * *

Rory sighed contentedly, her head resting against Jess' chest as her hand traced lazy patterns across his torso. She smiled as she felt his arm curling around her to pull her in tighter. "Kind of cutting off my air supply there, pal," she teased.

"I'm sorry, but you've proven yourself to be a flight risk, Gilmore," he replied, dropping a kiss on the top of her head, his arm still tight around her waist.

"So you're my probation officer now, Mariano?"

"It _would _bring our relationship a kind of poetic symmetry – plus, maybe handcuffs could be involved..."

"Now what kind of talk is that for someone who has yet to even take me on a date?"

"Book-shopping pretty much equates to dating for me."

"Wow, in that case we've been dating for quite a while."

"Yup."

"Guessing those month-anniversary gifts just got lost in the mail, then?"

"Did I not show up here with a stack of books?"

"My books," Rory corrected, before adding, "and while we're on the subject: lame."

"What?"

"Your excuse to come see me," she teased.

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"'I travelled 80.9 miles to deliver books to someone I'm really mad at'," she mocked.

"Well, the only thing on TV was _Saved by the Bell_ re-runs, so..."

"You wanted to see me," she sing-songed.

"I didn't even know they re-ran _Saved by the Bell_ anymore, but apparently so," he continued, evasive as ever.

"Okay, okay, if I have to listen to you talk about _Saved by the Bell_ rather than admit your own lameness, I'll drop it," she relented. She paused for a moment, then a thought struck her, "Hey, you got any plans for this summer?"

"Other than relishing the life of the non-community service worker? None."

She moved her head off of his chest so that her position mirrored his and they were face to face, "Well, I was thinking..."

"Always a dangerous sign," Jess replied, earning a light smack on the arm.

"Maybe, if you're not doing anything, you could come visit me in Stars Hollow?"

Jess hesitated, considering the offer, "Well, I'm not exactly rolling in cash at the moment; I'm thinking I'll probably have to take up my old messenger job over the summer."

"Well, Luke's always looking for more help around the diner if you need a job, and I'd bet he'd even let you stay in his old apartment above the store – he mainly lives with us now, anyway."

"I wouldn't be crashing with you?" Jess asked, eyebrows raised.

"Well, considering my room's about the size of a postage stamp, it'd be pretty close quarters."

"I can live with that," Jess replied, dropping a kiss on her shoulder.

"And you'd also be living with my mother...and your uncle, doing things of a, y'know, couple-y nature..."

"Luke's apartment it is."

"And I'm sure I could find it in my heart to drop by now and again, you being new to town and all..."

"Well that's very big of you," Jess said with a grin, pulling her in for a kiss, more lazy and relaxed than the impatient, desperate ones of before. When they broke apart, he looked into her eyes for a second, before asking, "You really want me to come?"

"I really want you to come," she confirmed.

"Okay, I'll talk to Luke about it," he resolved, revelling in the way her face immediately lit up with excitement.

She swooped in for another quick peck before starting to plan, "This is gonna be great: we can hang with Mom and Luke, head back to RBI with Lane, I get to watch you be terrorised by Miss Patti- oh, and I think the book fair's gonna be in town!"

"Miss Patti?"

"I think it's best to live in ignorance of that one until absolutely necessary. Oh yeah, and we'll have to catch a town meeting at some point."

"You seriously have town meetings? With a little council and everything?" he asked, incredulously.

"Why so interested? Thinking of running for town selectman?" she shot back with a grin.

"Well, you know how good my people skills are..."

"Ooh, let me be your campaign manager! I'll be the Leo to your Bartlet!"

Before Jess could respond, the door opened abruptly. Paris marched in and, without casting a single glance at the couple on the bed, headed straight for Rory's desk, retrieved a text book and walked straight out again, leaving a stunned silence in her wake as the door swung shut behind her. There was a momentary pause, before Jess asked, "What the hell just happened?"

Recovering from the initial surprise, Rory replied, "Research mode: as long as it lasts, she will be completely oblivious to all of her surroundings. And, apparently, indifferent towards the theft of my text books," she added. Upon seeing Jess' sceptical look, she continued, "I'm serious! The last time this happened, one of Logan's friends re-enacted _The Passion of the Christ_ in front of her in its entirety. Not so much as a yawn of acknowledgement – and believe me, she is the only person in human history not to have yawned during Finn's _Passion of the Christ_."

"Does that mean we get to stick post-its on her later?"

"Depends if we can find any."

"Please, this is Rory Gilmore's college room. There'll be post-its – colour-coded, most likely."

Rory pouted, "There is nothing abnormal about my stationery tendencies."

"Do you want to write me a memo to that effect using one of your twenty ball point pens?"

"Well, if I'm going to continue to be mocked, I'm gonna need sustenance. Food run?" she suggested, sitting up in bed and beginning to reach for her clothes.

"Sure, I'll bet you have a nice categorised stack of take-out menus around here somewhere," he replied, following suit.

"With gold stars next to my favourite dishes," she replied, sticking out her tongue defiantly as she pulled on the last of her clothes. "C'mon, we'll go to Hector's – I'm craving tacos," she said, grabbing the now fully-dressed Jess by the arm.

"As you wish," Jess relented, allowing himself to be pulled toward the door. Noticing something leaning against the bookcase out of the corner of his eye, he paused, gesturing towards it with a smirk, "You seriously kept Don here?"

"Of course," Rory replied, proudly, before her smile turned slightly sheepish as she added, "besides, it was kinda Don who triggered this whole thing, wasn't it?" she asked, gesturing between the two. "I think he deserves some recognition." She broke off as her stomach gave a growl, causing her to look at her new boyfriend, imploringly, "Tacos now, please?"

Grinning, Jess followed her out of the room, casting a quick glance back at the stupid garbage picker that started it all and muttering, "Thanks, buddy."

* * *

**A/N: Cheesy ending, I know, but hey – I happen to like cheese. Hope you enjoyed the last chapter, I'll be back soon with the epilogue!**


End file.
